The vast majority of goods sold in those markets is just drugs. Though admittedly I'm not a criminal and don't know anything about the more evil corners of the dark web.

Can you name a few of those "conventional" crime markets? I'm curious to know.

Exploit.in, verified, maza, xss. Loads of public runet forums, english language crime forums like darkode have all died but the russian forums welcome english speakers.

Fraud shops like unicc, ferum, slilpp move more money than darknet drug markets and primarily use BTC or LTC (I don’t think any accept XMR)

Hydra, the biggest darknet drug market still doesn’t accept monero.

Of course it would make sense for all of these people to be using monero, just like the efficient market hypothesis makes sense.

Cheers!

Hard to say what's the biggest shadow market of course but afaik WHM is the largest one for drugs and they only accept Monero. You're right, Bitcoin is still popular in the Russian forums, but that's at least partly because it's easier to cash it out anonymously over there. Lots of services that let you exchange your BTC for cash and my guess is the remaining coins just go through tumblers until they're clean.

https://news.bitcoin.com/darknet-giant-white-house-market-dr...

FWIW Hydra is vastly bigger drug market than WHM.