[failuser]

Crypto facilitates bypassing financial regulations, drug trade, evading taxes, extorting ransoms, breaking sanctions and so on. I’m not at all surprised it’s popular. I’m surprised that even relatively sane US admin did not crush it.

[toenail]

Money is used in crime, nothing surprising there, and the most popular money for crime is the USD.

[sneak]

This is a common retort used by crypto proponents (of which I am one). It overlooks, however, that is it much, much, much easier to do large-scale financial crime using cryptocurrencies than it is to do so with USD due to the intense and robust controls applied to USD for precisely that purpose.

One need only look at the rapid rise of cryptocurrencies in criminal enterprises over the last 10 years or so to see the truth in that.

[BoppreH]

Well, USD has many other (legal) uses. I have yet to see a legal use for Bitcoin that was not better served by cash or traditional banking.

[divbzero]

China, on the other hand, did.

[2017]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/11/bitcoin-price-falls-on-repor... "Bitcoin price falls again on reports that China is shutting down local exchanges"

[2021]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/22/china-crypto-crackdown-wipes... "China’s renewed crypto crackdown wipes $400 billion off the market as bitcoin slides"

[dist-epoch]

You realize the irony of looking at those titles, and then at the present day price of bitcoin, which is 25x, 10x the price at the time of those articles.

[tim333]

It's hard to crush. The whole design is made that way so if you shut it down in one country it continues in other ones.

Also it funnels money to the people running it which enables them to lobby etc politicians.