How Monero Replaced Bitcoin on the Internet's Underground, and What That Means for XMR's Long Term Prospects.
By Terry Werner
January 7, 2026
More than 15 years ago, the first known purchase of a physical good using Bitcoin famously took place when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC (currently worth just shy of $1 Billion USD) for two large pizzas. But the journey from a Cypherpunk hobby to one of the most hyped and widely traded financial assets in the world didn't happen because of nerds ordering Papa John's. Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency itself, undeniably got to where it is so quickly because of it's first "killer app": online drug sales.
The story is well known; a young Libertarian called Ross Ulbricht created an online marketplace, the server and traffic hidden by the Tor network, using Bitcoin for payments. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 BTC[1].
Alarmed politicians and other authorities around the world demonized, and in several cases outright banned[2] the use of the revolutionary blockchain technology. Banks shut down countless accounts of customers who dared to buy and sell Bitcoin. Meanwhile, the attention the Silk Road generated spread to Bitcoin, and combined with the demand from Darknet users, the price rose steadily. From pennies, to dollars, to over $200 USD by the time the FBI put the party on hold by seizing the marketplace, along with at least 170,000 Bitcoins in the process. Since the closure of that original marketplace, hundreds if not thousands of new markets have appeared on the onion network to replace it. This show of resilience helped propel crypto use, and the price of Bitcoin, towards the stratosphere where it has remained.
In those days, illicit and privacy focused users of crypto would use services called "mixers" to obfuscate the connection between themselves and the illegal markets. Authorities, along with companies seeking government contracts, quickly developed blockchain analysis technology that rendered this method obsolete. All transactions with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most other tokens, even using mixers, can now be traced fairly easily.
Enter Monero (XMR).
The one true "privacy coin" currently in existence, Monero was engineered from the ground up to be completely untraceable by anyone, forever. Using ring signatures[3], and stealth addresses[4], there is no way an outside observer can tell which of the possible signers in a signature group belongs to your account. Ring signatures ensure that transaction outputs are untraceable. Moreover, there are no fungibility problems with Monero because every transaction output has plausible deniability. The network, and anyone monitoring it, can't tell which outputs are spent or unspent.
MOST VISITED DN BIBLE PAGES
-Darknet links and resources.-Using Monero (XMR) to keep your crypto transactions private.
-Choosing a Darknet Market.
Privacy focused Cypherpunks, Darknet Market operators, and the buyers and sellers who use them, have certainly taken notice. Monero is no new, unproven technology... first released in 2014, it has been tried and tested for over a decade now, without a hint of failure. The IRS has offered a bounty of up to $625,000 for developing tools to trace Monero transactions, which remains and will likely continue to remain unredeemed. Monero is also the only truly fungible cryptocurrency, since unlike coins with public blockchains, it is impossible to blacklist Monero addresses. These days the vast majority of Darknet Markets use XMR exclusively... Bitcoin is not even allowed on new markets expecting to make the "Superlist" of trusted shopping locations.
The vast and steady demand for coins this creates is the reason XMR is one of the only tokens to have gained value during the recent bear market. Monero currently trades for around $450 USD... this time last year it was half that. Much like early Bitcoin, it keeps steadily increasing in value as usage goes up. Also like early Bitcoin, in spite of many exchanges de-listing the token, and even several countries (France, Japan) restricting its usage, Monero has proven unstoppable, easy to use, and fast. It's this author's opinion that these facts all but guarantee long term usage and price increases. It's almost impossible to picture its price decreasing, but not hard to envision a series of massive spikes as its usage continues to expand, and knowledge of its usefulness and reliability continues to grow.
Monero has proven to be true digital gold in a way that Bitcoin was never able to be, totally fungible and untraceable. Use it like cash, but hodl as much as you possible can. There is almost certainly no stopping this token's meteoric rise now.
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