Silk Road gave Bitcoin its first mainstream use case and attention

Evidence

NFTs entered global consciousness through the wider craze for cryptocurrency. Back in 2008, the enigmatic “Satoshi Nakamoto” published a white paper proposing Bitcoin, an electronic currency detached from the traditional financial system. Bitcoin’s foundations lay in blockchain technology, which used a public ledger to document every transaction. Though initially embraced by a fringe of techno-anarchists, Bitcoin struggled to gain traction without a compelling use case. That changed with the dark-web marketplace Silk Road, where Bitcoin became the currency of choice for purchasing drugs and other illicit services. In April 2013, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of The Social Network fame bought up 1 percent of the world’s Bitcoins. By October, the FBI had shuttered Silk Road, but the attention brought baseball-cap-wearing normies into Bitcoin. Ideologues hailed cryptocurrency as a cure-all for global financial woes, while speculators banked on ever-increasing demand to inflate prices. By 2021, a single Bitcoin hit a high of $68,000, turning the Winklevoss twins into billionaires. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 720

Categorization

• CANDY: Illicit drug marketplace as crypto’s killer app is a genuinely fun irony to drop into conversation.