Bitcoin and the Deep Web.
The most heard of in the Deep Web is that everything imaginable is sold, and this is true. There are some legitimate stores that have some reputation in forums, but we won't get into those. However, the majority of sites are scams, a term widely read in this world, which means they are fraudulent and only interested in one thing: scamming you.
In general, browsing the deep web is not illegal, but buying or selling on it is.
One of the most well-known cases was Silk Road SILK ROAD which you can imagine as Amazon, but with a large number of products for sale being drugs. It was one of the first platforms to accept Bitcoin as a payment method.
Silk Road, founded by Ross Ulbricht, operated from 2010 until late 2013 when the FBI managed to track it down in an operation called TORNADO, which refers to the use of the TOR browser to access the deep web.
The dominance of this marketplace was so strong that it influenced the price of Bitcoin for several years. To become a seller, you had to have a fixed amount in your wallet, which led to an accumulation that drove the price to its peak of $5. Looking back, we all wish we could have bought and accumulated at that price.
Many years have passed since then, and Bitcoin has evolved. While it is not easy to trace transactions, we now have some tools to do so, significantly reducing its use on the deep web. The strongest financial institutions now have control over the price of Bitcoin.
Due to preference, many deep web stores now use Monero (XMR), a cryptocurrency focused on user anonymity.
One opinion about this market is that, as mentioned earlier, a large part of it sells illegal products. However, there is another part that uses the deep web for high privacy and a lower likelihood of their data being traded.
DID YOU KNOW THAT ALMOST ALL YOUR DATA ON THE NORMAL INTERNET, WHETHER ON SOCIAL MEDIA OR NOT, IS SOLD TO BIG BRANDS?
In conclusion, although Bitcoin was heavily used in these types of markets in the past, it is becoming less common, and on the contrary, more significant investors are accumulating it.