Your point is a good one. I don't think it invalidates what I said, since my still valid message would get lost if I hedged it with "except (more or less) organ

Your point is a good one. I don't think it invalidates what I said, since my still valid message would get lost if I hedged it with "except (more or less) organized crime". But I agree that Silk Road was an economy. Just like slave trading and other human trafficking is an economy. We do still have an illegal cryptocurrency economy. It's more tilted towards the ransomware economy than drugs, though. So it's not just pyramid schemes. But I'm sure crypto drug kingpins and murderers like Ross Ulbricht are still out there. In fact recently I listened to a money podcast that investigated if hitmen paid in cryptocurrency on the dark web were a real thing. I can't find it now, but the answer was that most are scams, but yes actually there's a nonzero number who will kill the person. But back to my point: Most people talking about the cryptocurrency utopia (though most have given up on that, instead shifting to "it's a store of value!"), when they (de facto) say "real cryptocurrency economy has not been tried" mean the non-traditionally-criminal economy. So I also don't think that what I said was wrong. It depends what you mean by the word "real". :-)