Heroin is a commodity drug. Unlike pot, LSD, and shrooms, heroin and other opiates are must-haves because they are so addictive. There is literally a steady pac

Heroin is a commodity drug. Unlike pot, LSD, and shrooms, heroin and other opiates are must-haves because they are so addictive. There is literally a steady pace at which the users require it, different though it may be per user. Without heroin, the user is in serious pain and suffering. This basically means there is tremendous and steady demand for heroin, and thus suppliers have the upper hand. On the black market Tor sites, a lot of the forum transcripts you read insinuate that, while initial contacts may be made on these markets, some people were and are moving very large quantities of drugs through outside agreements. I've seen forum threads describing transactions between two parties that grew up to the $100k range, but of course, the side that money was transferred to vanished immediately. That means the black market sites and escrow systems are basically mandatory for these transactions to take place reliably, and thus, the market for them is out in the open, with visible pricing. In the end, the one thing that was lacking in this market was the BitCoin. High demand, low supply. Thus, the market cap of BitCoin quickly rose toward being an equivalent for the entire black market worldwide, but a better proxy for that, with a steadier definition and a fairly tight correlation to the whole shebang that is illegal commerce, is heroin. So while black market transactions in general are what really made BitCoin what it was, heroin was the only real commodity being traded that could be considered to be something similar to gold, oil, or pork bellies: more traditional goods for which the market has steady demand. I capitalized for emphasis. I consider Heroin to be sort of a synecdoche for the pricing of the black market. Heroin is the S&P 500 of the black market.