Not making this up... I read this and immediately bought 4btc more monero.

I value your input.

  Exit scam.  He ran off with 7 figures.   I am very sympathetic to those who lost money, but good riddance IMO.

I came too close a number of times. Thank god it was all just too complicated for me.

Well I assume CK was the biggest single use case of Monero? I doubt there was no significiant demand from dark markets for Monero....? 

Money made by scamming and stealing will not bring blessing to you. It is even better to have less money but the money is made in honest way than have shitloads of stolen money.  Scamming seems the fast track to riches but it actually ends badly and the thieves will become sooner or later broke.

He locked the game thread and started a "new" game. I doubt there are any/many actual players besides his imaginary friends.

The original game continues with a few die hards who have kicked him out and are attempting to revive it.

You can read more here: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1890786.0

Other than that it seems somewhat off topic. CK was certainly not the biggest use case for XMR, though it had ambitions of growing into that, never realized.

AFAIK AB was turning over most of the non-financial transactions, but counting requires using proxy statistics because of CT etc. I have been too busy lately to do that work.  Maybe soon, when the dnm situation is stable again.

I personally bought lots of stuff with xmr.  Notably, 8 works of art, two automobiles, one prescribed drug, an undisclosed amount of physical gold and silver, and an undisclosed amount of currency.  But I am not a typical transactional user.  A typical transactional user today will use it for dnm, and in future will use it for remittances.

When I use it, I gradually repurchase, to maintain a constant level of holdings overall, in the long run.  Most of the demand is still reserve demand - and probably always will be, since nothing else on the planet is as immune to extortion, theft, or disaster, so it is the ideal savings vehicle.  If you want some sense of the float which will be used in the xmr economy I think the polo stock is probably a good first order approximation, so around 200k of xmr supply, the rest being held in reserve.

What's bigger is simply speculation, and wanting a private store of value (this is somewhat circular as it involves speculating on it being an even more useful private store of value in the future).

Why exclude poloniex or speculation in general. Most of CK was just yet more speculation anyway (land, in-game assets, etc.). Very few put money into the game solely or even primarily for the reason of "Oh, this game is SO much fun I want to SPEND money on it!"

Transactional use inevitably exists because people who are storing value want to spend it (or for that matter add to it, as savings). So they trade for other currencies (perhaps through other intermediates first), which requires transactions.

All of this is use.

That said, it would not surprise me if 2% of Alphabay, while in a sense "barely used" might still dwarf the transactional volume of CK.

If you are referring to AB, after starting as BTC only, they added XMR; then they added ETH; then when they added ZEC they got raided almost immediately.  At no point did they drop any crypto from the support list.

I wonder whether ETH and ZEC will still be supported if they resume ops?  It will be interesting to follow the AB reddit for a while.

I think the main goal has to be to find new acceptance places. With that people will learn about it and get more information by researching!