The shadow cryptoamnesia is happening serious struggle: as bitcoin is losing ground on the “dark side” of the Internet due to high cost of transactions and frequent delays. But what a token can replace him?
It would be logical to assume that the main competitor to BTC in this environment is Monero: full control of own funds, high anonymous, untraceable transfers — XMR seemingly created for people interested in illegal goods and services.
In reality everything turned out differently. The company Reported Future analyzed 150 Internet forums and trading sites in the network darkweb. On the basis of reports from the potential buyers and sellers, as well as lists accepted for payment on these platforms cryptocurrency, the researchers came to the conclusion that cybercriminals prefer Litecoin.
The fall of bitcoin
Ironically, it was the popularity of BTC has played against him. A huge number of operations is heavily loaded the network, which delayed the translation.
Such delays can lead to big problems in the economy so volatile and full of risks, as the darknet market, says Andrew performance expert, head of early fees Reported Future.
“The Bitcoin network was completely unprepared for the incredible growth that we have seen in the past two years. Before transfers in bitcoins took place instantly … now … you can send someone money, and it may take more than 24 hours.”
According to Barysevich, high speed is particularly important in the field of cybercrime because of the high risk and lack of trust between the parties to the transaction:
“Imagine that you do business in darkweb and you need to buy the stolen information — you need to make the transfer as quickly as possible. […] If you said you sent payment, and a day later people still didn’t get it, he’ll think you cheated him, that the goods you have, but you were not going to pay. So this created a huge problem for the people now consider to be dishonest business and whose reputation was hurt.”
Litecoin is gaining darknet
At LTC, by contrast, no such problems. Although its technology uses the same algorithm as BTC, it’s still faster and cheaper and is present on many major exchanges around the world.
Litecoin faster transactions and, as a result, lower transaction fees. In addition, the stock of mining LTC much higher than bitcoin; however, there are no additional security protocols.
Overall Litecoin used on 30% of the analysed sites. The second most popular virtual currency is the Dash (20%), followed by Bitcoin Cash (13%), Ethereum (9%) and Monero (6%).
Theoretically, this could mean a General decline in the popularity of bitcoin. According to Trendymen, Google indexes only 16% of online resources and, therefore, the greater part falls on the hidden network.
Despite this, experts believe that it is much more likely to “shift” BTC is Ripple. Read more about this in our article “Opinion: XRP is the new bitcoin?”.
