The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins

Bitcoin has been the de facto currency of the Dark Web - the 'hidden' Internet accessible only by Tor - since the pioneering marketplace Silk Road, the 'eBay of drugs', arrived in 2011. But just how much do we know about these new underground economies? Who is buying and selling - and what? Here's what available data can tell us about bitcoin on the Dark Web. Bitcoin on the Dark Web: the Facts

Many people believe that search engines, especially Google, can index most of the pages available on the web for a given search query. Nonetheless, the truth is that there is a massive part of the internet that cannot be accessed by Google's crawling spiders. This part of the web is known as the "Dark Web" and it is a place where cryptocurrency, namely bitcoin, is the official currency. What is The Dark Web? The dark web, or deep web (false name as the deep web is a part of the dark web), represents the parts of the world wide web that are hosted on overlay networks, darknets, TOR....

The Department of Justice, together with Homeland Security, USPS, and the IRS have been able to arrest one man selling drugs via the dark web. Accessing these underground marketplaces requires special software- called Tor - which lets users access the part of the Internet that is not indexed by search engines. The term dark web seems to come up fairly often these days, and in most cases, there is a link to Bitcoin being used as one of the supported payment methods. A recent arrest in Fresno, CA is related both Bitcoin and the dark web, as one person was identified as selling drugs on an....

Paying a higher price can be annoying, but it is still worth it to the majority of deep web users. Plus, Bitcoin developers are working on adding privacy and anonymity to the protocol, which will benefit users of dark markets even more. The recent Bitcoin network congestion has been a topic of substantial debate on Reddit. But could it affect something as obscure as the dark markets? Despite the block reward halving, they should have no imminent need of switching to different forms of payments. It would be shortsighted to deny the success Bitcoin has on the deep web. Underground....

A new bill paying cryptocurrency platform wins “Best Pitch” at the Technology & Innovation - The future of Digital Payments Conference recently held at the Sidney Hilton Hotel. If you are over 50 years old you probably remember sitting at the kitchen table each monday writing and mailing checks to pay your bills. Bill paying has always been either tedious or expensive and is often both. When this began to change with things like automatic bill payments and direct deposits, exorbitant fees and mistakes like overbilling started becoming commonplace. The Brisbane, Australia startup Living....