The reality is, is that people aren't going to see what monero brings to the table unless it is put into action... and what better way to show it's true anonymity powers than in the world of .onion sites? I personally don't care for such things or drugs of any kind, but a lot of people in the world does... this is how bitcoin got it's name from the get go, personally I can see this type of thing helping Monero, even though we would probably have to deal with the implications of a "bad rep" just like bitcoin had to get over.
I dont think you will see any significant xmr presence in darknet any time soon. At the moment, that how it looks for monero in darknet:
https://i.imgur.com/e4FI4Vh.pngOther search engines give few results to dead onion links at this point with some mentions of monero. The point I'm making is that monero virtually does not exist in darknet. And I'm not talking about any darknet markets, but just normal onion sites about monero, such as onion monero wallet, onion blockchain view website, onion btc<->xmr exchange site, etc.
The only onion websites that I know and are about monero (or mention it in some way) are:
http://moneroxzfonkazxc.onion/ which is: http://moneronodes.i2p.xyz/
http://safedice2ge73n2g.onion/ which is: https://safedice.com/
http://ucphth5lasyp4enj.onion/ which is: http://www.bitcoinisnotanonymous.com/
Hmm... I remember seeing that picture a little while back and all of that does make sense, but maybe the people who browse the darknet don't really do anything else besides get high and sell stuff on there. Point being, is that they wouldn't pay attention to forums like these and look for a better alternative; hell, I believe that they really don't care as long as they are getting paid in the short term look of things.
But this could be bad/good for monero... It could mean that if/when monero gets more popular and more people start using it, news article won't/couldn't just report that monero is used ONLY for the darknet and that it's ONLY for
bad people. Then again, if it did reach and influence tor users, then that would probably mean a faster adoption rate.
Hard to tell which is the right course of action, but I personally like seeing that monero starts out on a clean slate and doesn't associate itself with drug lords.
