Meeh! Not even that, anymore.
In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug dealers want crypto currency.
I've never used a darknet market.
I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days.
I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months.
I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places...
Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.
When you take one currency pair with 8 digits of precision that’s PROGRAMMED to deflate and trade that against an inflating currency with 2 digits of precision...
You’re going to need a whole lot of the inflating thing to buy the deflating thing, this is math.
Me personally, my electrical bills and the costs I’ve eaten has yielded tremendous value: for me. I mined, I was rewarded, I stimulated the economy.
Long before there was an economy.