It would be a shame if this keeps happening, like: (2013) Bitcoin and its clones failed at all their stated purposes, (2017) the ICO craze left nothing of value, (2021) the DeFi/NFT bubble also left nothing but rubble. This stuff is zero sum, shuffling money without creating new things of enduring value.
Dark web markets absolutely still exist. The traceability problem is at least partially solved using mixers. I don't know everything there is to know here, like how easy it is to get back fiat.
The markets get busted (or become scams), the dealers not so much. If you’re on these markets regularly for years you’re probably communicating directly with sellers at this point.
Bitcoin did factually fail at its stated goal, as laid out in the original whitepaper. Bitcoin has not succeeded at being a peer-to-peer currency, because the "peer-to-peer" part went out the window when users stopped hosting their own nodes, and the currency part was abandoned when people realized that transaction throughput is fatally low.
Well, more like it’s no longer p2p after the 2017 hard fork and people are being pushed to use Lightning which centralizes over time through hub and spoke model, and many people prefer to use custodial wallets.
