same volume of sales listed on dark market sites.
That's listings volume. Not sales. Huge difference.
It may be just the
number of listings, not even considering quantity of each item.
Is there an estimate of the sales volume (USD/year or equivalent) of those dark markets?
The complaint published when Ulbricht was arrested included information the FBI gained from a system image of the Silk Road server collected on 23 July 2013.[citation needed] It noted that, "From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 there were approximately 1,229,465 transactions completed on the site. The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. These figures are equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions, at current Bitcoin exchange rates...", according to the September 2013 complaint, and involved 146,946 buyers and 3,877 vendors.[12] According to information users provided upon registering, 30 percent were from the United States, 27 percent chose to be "undeclared," and beyond that, in descending order of prevalence: the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, France, Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands. During the 60-day period from 24 May to 23 July, there were 1,217,218 messages sent over Silk Road's private messaging system.[12]
Not really sure but its def in the tens of billions per year. Also there is a bigger shadow economy operating on the darkweb, worth hundreds of billions, the users include, big pharma corps/politicians/businessmen/bankers and lords of war. They turnover more than the world economy every year. Alot tried using BTC but now that they know they can be traced easily they are looking at other types of crypto.
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