is it still worth to buy monero?
I buy a small amount every week no matter where the price is and haven't regretted it yet. Only wish I had been doing it sooner (as in before alphabay).
The next Alphabay will have a much, much larger impact on the fundamental value of XMR. For one thing, it won't allow BTC or ZEC (insert image of Cazes hanging by his belt in a Bankok jail cell). For another, it will grow faster and to a much larger size:. The pent-up demand will be enormous, and the fear factor involved in using BTC or ZEC won't be there to inhibit transactions.
But bootstrapping trust requires magic. How long that will take, I do not know. If it takes too long, a technical solution will emerge.
Cazes was caught by using a hotmail.com address in the AlphaBay welcome email, which had nothing to do with BTC. Are there any known cases of darknet market users being caught by tracing BTC transactions? I doubt police in most countries would have the resources to do that.
Edit: I thought about this some more and I see the benefit now. Monero is untraceable and as a vendor this has great utility. Although I expect governments to hate this. Bitcoin will be regulated. XMR will be outright banned.
One question: Assuming future darknet markets adopt XMR, will the Monero network be able to scale to accommodate that?
He might have been caught from his hotmail.com address, but he would be accused and set to prison because of his transparent BTC or ZEC transactions. I dont think sending emails is illegal.