Cazes was caught by using a hotmail.com address in the AlphaBay welcome email, which had nothing to do with BTC.
It is by such just-so stories that LEO methods are concealed. Anyhow, I think this smells more of ZEC, with the July 1 introduction and July 5 bust.
Bitcoin will be regulated. XMR will be outright banned.
Not in the U.S., as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the constitution guarantees a right to privacy.
One question: Assuming future darknet markets adopt XMR, will the Monero network be able to scale to accommodate that?
Yes. Monero was designed for scalability, with adaptive parameters.