According to Ciphertrace's report on Anti Money Laundering almost all drugs sold on darknet are bought with crypto. The University of Technology Sydney reports that 46% of illegal activity per year is associated with Bitcoin. I found this article interesting because it is a hot topic of conversation for a lot of people who are quick to judge crypto.
While it makes sense to use unanimous money to purchase drugs, cash seems to remain the largest use for carrying out illicit transactions because it is untraceable. Ciphertrace did point out that 76% of transactions on dark markets are still made with BTC mostly due to it being the most widely known.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think it's going to be a better way to track where money is moving?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-cash-and-drugs-crypto-use-grows-as-drug-trade-digitalizesThe real question here is that is it really fair to attribute the illegal actions of individuals to the currency, on the means of transaction that they are using? Absolutely not.
If there was no BTC, the drug trade would still exist. And it's quite hypocritical to talk about the increasing volume of transactions when fiat far outweighs any other asset class in illict transaction volume, such as money laundering etc., yet we don't ever talk about it.
The article makes it seem like that the growth in crypto adoption is purely resulting from the increased use of the dark web as a marketplace for drugs, which is not only misleading but untrue completely. This last bear market brought in a lot more institutional adoption, including investment banks, as well as commercial adoption of BTC for online purchases (just look at the amount of e-sports sites in particular that started to accept BTC).