There were multi-million dollar cyber black markets before Bitcoin even existed. Granted most of them were concerned with stealing credit card information and hacking into bank accounts though. There are a lot of safe ways to handle financial transactions though. There must be a dozen different E-currency providers in a dozen different countries that don't require identification documents to get accounts with. Pretty much any electronic currency can be mixed. So some places are making it hard to get Bitcoins, but really it is not that hard. You can still send money via WU or bank wire to any of the several dozen different traditional E-currency exchangers, cash it out to liberty reserve or pecunix and then buy bitcoins from an exchanger that takes those forms of payment. The world is a huge place and there are a shit ton of different E-currencies and exchangers that convert between them, to be entirely focused on Bitcoin and Mt. Gox is to ignore the numerous other non-blocked channels through which Bitcoins can be obtained. I don't think that there will be a globally enforced shutdown of all anonymous E-currencies / exchangers, and even if there is fifty others will pop up to replace them. Nothing short of a global ban on these sorts of services can hamper anyone who puts effort into getting bitcoin. Look at this exchanger, I just use them as an example because of their past reputation as being legitimate (however I can not and do not currently vouch for them as I have not used their services in a long time): https://www.wm-center.com/ they sell bitcoin for the following currencies: Liberty Reserve, C-Gold, Pecunix, Hoopay, Perfect Money Liberty Reserve used to be a good bet but last I checked they crack down a bit more now. It is still probably possible to get a Liberty Reserve account anonymously without it being locked though. Pecunix is a great choice last I checked. Not sure about the other options. However I know there are several dozen exchangers who exchange Liberty Reserve and all of these other E-currencies between each other and they accept payment via everything from cash in the mail to western union to bank wire transfers. So what you do is send western union to one exchanger, give them the LR details of WM-center, they send LR to WM center, give WM center your bitcoin address and setup a trade between LR and bitcoin with them. Now you can buy bitcoins through any exchanger at all kinds of locations around the world, you just need to use indirection. Additionally you greatly increase your anonymity by doing it this way because now the trail stretches over multiple countries, E-currencies, etc. Before bitcoin came around the big vendors layered exchangers and e-currencies like this for anonymity and none had any real problems with it (although cashing out with an anonymous debit card helps infinitely). Pretty much you just need to think outside of the Bitcoin box and you will see that restricting our ability to do financial exchange is nearly impossible. They can make it more difficult to use mainstream methods and go through popular channels perhaps, but with a bit of indirection added to the loading they become completely lost.