My impression always was that the heroin market on the darknet markets is rather small. The best i could find is this: https://www.economist.com/international/

My impression always was that the heroin market on the darknet markets is rather small. The best i could find is this: https://www.economist.com/international/2016/07/16/shedding-light-on-the-dark-web https://www.economist.com/international/2016/07/16/shedding-... which pretty much reflects my own impression. I've been curiously following this stuff since early on and the first markets were even primarly focused on stuff like psychodelics and weed. It surely had an impact but putting it like you did sounds like stretch as well. Personally i dont think that drugs alone backed Bitcoin. From a outside perspective there seems to be a lot more money in speculation than drugs. In fact its likely that "drug bitcoin" rather fast got turned into $ again, so bringing the actual bitcoins back to investors/platforms/the next buyer/whatever. Plus a lot of bigger drug trade these days is professional on a level where Bitcoin isnt even necessary. I mean you basically can order all you need for XTC from Alibaba and pay with your credit card, cheap, clean & legal pre-processor products.