I reckon the sudden increase of unconfirmed transactions will affect not only transactions in the darknet but obviously also the transactions in the clearnet. It would be good to know how clearnet transactions, going into services like gambling sites, are badly affected by long confirmation times and also if
bitcoin only gambling sites are now willing to accept altcoins.
There are good alternatives out there but Ethereum is not one of them like what the article mentioned.
Users on r/darknetmarkets complained of transactions sent to Dream, the largest DNM, that were unconfirmed after five hours. The Dream forum is filled with similar tales of woe, including dozens of complaints filed in the last 24 hours. Customers of the darknet, who are often in a hurry to get their goods, think nothing of paying high confirmation fees – even when those fees are approaching $10, as has been the case with bitcoin recently. Even with higher fees selected, however, transactions have still been slow.
Privacy Coins Prosper
It wasn’t transaction issues that spurred many DNMs into accepting alternative digital currencies, but rather privacy. Law enforcement are becoming increasingly adept at assigning bitcoin addresses to real world identities, as a number of deep web vendors have discovered in the past year. Nevertheless, when the bitcoin network is under strain, altcoins provide additional benefits, facilitating quick and low-cost transactions.
Dream has yet to accept alternatives to bitcoin, but Point Marketplace (formerly Tochka) and Aero do, the former taking ethereum and the latter accepting monero. Then there is Libertas, which is a monero-only marketplace. Monero has risen in value over the past week, though how much of that can be attributed to darknet adoption is debatable.Read the whole article https://news.bitcoin.com/darknet-markets-back-blockchain-bloated-whos-buying/