Cedric mentions the darknet being something that you need Bitcoin to transact monetarily in. He talked at length about Ethereum not having such a strong use case because of it being a general smart contract platform and DeFi not having a compelling use case. I think he's right about it.

But I wonder if Bitcoin really is the go-to currency on the darknet. Is that Cedric's finding after talking to people who use it? It would seem to me that using Monero would be the coin of choice for illegal transactions. With Bitcoin you have to be careful with your hygiene or your transactions could accidentally give away not only yourself but a lot of other people. An immutable public ledger with all the addresses and the amounts visible sounds like a nightmare for criminals. Better than banks, of course, but a stealth protocol would be even better. Is there really not enough liquidity in Monero to facilitate criminal transactions? With cross-chain atomic swaps not even getting delisted from centralized exchanges should be a hindrance for the success of protocols like Monero or Zcash.