The well-known darknet marketplace White House Market has stopped supporting payments in bitcoin and now accepts only Monero. This was announced on social networks of the market.
It says that the White House no longer accepts bitcoin, as the third-party provider of the exchange API Morphtoken “suddenly decided to block access to the Tor nodes.”
“Although it is easy to circumvent this problem, we decided to support their will. The bitcoin option was necessary to help move to Monero (XMR). As far as we know, it was done. So now we only support Monero, as planned, ” the White House wrote.
Earlier, Europol analyst Jarek Jakubcek said that tracking bitcoin transactions is not particularly difficult for them, but everything changes when a criminal decides to use Monero.
“Because the suspect used a combination of TOR and Monero, we could not track the movement of funds. We couldn’t track the IP addresses. In other words, we were at a dead end. Everything that happened in the bitcoin blockchain was available for viewing, which is why we went far enough. But with the Monero blockchain, we have reached a point where the investigation has stopped. It is a classic example of one of the many cases where the suspect decided to withdraw money from Bitcoin or Ethereum to Monero, ” he said.
Even before that, Jakubcek reported that cybercriminals are increasingly abandoning bitcoin in favor of more anonymous alternatives, such as Monero, ZCash, and Dash.