[brbsix]

    Even its strongest selling point, absolute privacy, is mostly a lie

That only became a supposed selling point among the uninformed as a result of widespread misrepresentation in the media. At least from my perspective, nobody using it very early (i.e. 2011-12) was ever under any illusion that privacy or anonymity were a feature. People using it for illicit purposes have never been. Mixing services and informal brokers willing to exchange cash for BTC were widely available for that reason even then. Later of course BTC->XMR->BTC and then CoinJoin et al.

[herbst]

This is the same timeline i remember. When Bitcoin was still new it did not seem a lot more practical for illegal/grey area things than other things that were already etablished (PaySafe, PerfectMoney or even PayPal for example).

It's only when the media picked up that drug markets are starting to use Bitcoin (they've been there before, just not at that scale) when the sentiment changed.