Data shows that in 2012, bitcoin was hot on the dark web, when more than 47% of all bitcoin transactions were done via the dark web, but now that percentage has dropped to less than 1%.
The first reason is that Bitcoin is now less dependent on the not-so-good place that is the dark web, and is used in increasing numbers for legitimate transactions.
The second layer is that bitcoin is no longer the first choice in the face of increasing fees and other digital currencies are gradually being accepted by the black market.
With some of these digital currencies, there is no way to tell where the money is coming from, where it is going, and even if the address is traced but cannot be traced back to the original holder, the private design feels like it is tailor-made for the dark web.
In fact, the original darknet has little to do with bitcoin, I don't know if you know the Tor project, the project was initially financially supported by the U.S. military, but it was said that in 2004 the project was in funding difficulties, the U.S. Navy lab cut off most of the financial support for Tor and open source it.
From then on Tor users were no longer limited to intelligence officers, students, staff, dissidents, journalists, drug dealers, hackers were all able to join in, and finally the situation, which is now so full of the dark side of human nature, developed in a way that no one expected.
Kevin Kelly writes in What Technology Wants, "Human nature - needs, desires, fears, primitive instincts, and the noblest of ideals - is constantly being transformed by ourselves and our inventions."
Technology was invented in the first place only to solve problems, and this problem contains the good, the bad, and the ugly of human nature, which is always going back and forth between the domestication and the reverse domestication of man and what he finds or invents.
In 2014, fast podcasting Wang Xin prison, a vote of netizens for him to lament, fast podcasting player with a technology called P2P network technology, the technology itself is just a network transmission technology, each user will share part of the computing power it has, storage capacity, network connectivity, the more users in this network to join, the faster the download speed instead.
The reason why it is linked to piracy and SQ is because all users can publish shared files and disseminate information, and there is no central control.
And P2P network technology is the cornerstone of blockchain, blockchain on this basis to add consensus mechanism, cryptography and other technologies to improve the security and consistency of data and to protect nodes against the risk of attacks and tampering with data, almost few people would associate blockchain and cachet together, so the technology itself is neutral, depending on the people who use it.
The dark web, even if it stinks, is not useless; today's Internet and the real world are both weak on the privacy of personal information, and the dark web is more privacy conscious than the bright web, which may somehow fit into the web of the future, as well as satisfy people's desire for privacy.
Bitcoin has been criticized by outsiders as a "money laundering tool" due to its special blockchain technology and properties, thus negating all its future value.
But water can carry a boat and overturn it, just as nuclear energy can produce electricity and scientific research, and can cause the tragedy that Hiroshima Nagasaki cannot erase.
The digital currency is still at a primitive stage, and there are still many applications that need to be improved and regulated. Although the growth of bitcoin is inseparable from the dark web, as mentioned above, only 1% of bitcoin's huge trading community is now circulating in the dark web, and the rest are legal transactions, and this percentage continues to decline.
"The reason for the existence of all things is for the eternal good of mankind" cannot be poured out along with the children in the water just because the bath water is dirty.
Every technology is an expression of the human will, technology is sinless, it is only a product of human thought and social progress, it has no intention of its own, what is sinful is humanity and the human heart.