If you wanted to buy contraband online in the last five years or so, you may have noticed that the option to pay in bitcoin — once the most popular form of payment on darknet markets — is slowly disappearing.
You may ask why it matters to you or the average Bitcoin enthusiast. (You’re presumably an excellent, law abiding citizen — good for you, but that is irrelevant.) Allow me to explain.
The Silk Road
The first major milestone of bitcoin was to be accepted as a form of money. This happened with small obscure merchants at the early stages, but as the word spread, bitcoin found itself as the “official” currency of the darknet, and allowed the creation of a market called “Silk Road.”
Silk Road was a revolutionary online marketplace. Merchants from all around the world could transact from the comfort of their own home, whenever they wanted, and could sell (and customers could buy) whatever they wanted, all with a new form of uncensorable, decentralized and easy-to-use form of money: bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s adoption depended on markets like Silk Road to pioneer, and what was special about Silk Road is that it was an almost completely free (as in freedom) market. Free…
