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Do you ever watch highway traffic at an odd time of day? I have the same thoughts about it. Who are all these people? Where do they need to go at 1am on a Monday morning? How did they get the money to buy these cars?

Yeah, the world is a pretty big place.

dark markets, ransomware, bypassing capital controls, tax avoidance, international payments, backpage ads, speculative trading

Care to expand on backpage ads?

He or she's talking about backpage.com. They're infamous for hosting prostitution ads.

citation?

This isn't an encyclopedia, it's an informal messaging board. If you want citations that badly, use your old pal Google and go find them.

Also, one word posts will almost always get downvotes unless you're answering a question that can reasonably be answered with only one word.

this is all an estimate. it's comprised of trading (to and from exchanges), sure, but also mining rewards, etc. there are some orgs analyzing the data, e.g. www.chainalysis.com