I agree maybe if they could use money freely they'd invade the system more, corrupt more people, buy a police station, whatever I guess I felt that was implied

I agree maybe if they could use money freely they'd invade the system more, corrupt more people, buy a police station, whatever I guess I felt that was implied. Making crime harder does reduce the amount of crime. That's pretty obvious. Like I said, ransomware was possible for decades but only became a big thing once Bitcoin made it easy to anonymously extract money from people on the internet and then launder the proceeds. Tor markets had no new tech in it except cryptocurrency: Tor and sealed envelopes had been around for many years. It took a breakdown in AML and the instant it happened those sites mushroomed. Now, you might say, drugs, ok, so what. There are other sites where you can get worse stuff, of course. In the very beginning Silk Road had no rules about what you could sell. Very quickly ads appeared for nuclear material and slave girls. I remember that back then; nobody was quite sure if the ads were real or if they were very convincingly done trolls. Nobody wanted to find out either, Ulbricht didn't waste any time in deciding his site was maybe not quite the absolutist free market he had planned. From then on it was restricted to certain kinds of goods. All this, to piss off a drug dealer trying to buy a Ferrari while kids die in the streets under the batons of the Police One of the difficulties of evaluating a system for blocking abuse that works well is that after a while all you have is the false positives and bad activity that isn't blocked. So it's easy to get down on it and say, well, look at what we're stopping: huge efforts and there's hardly anything there. Well, yeah. That's what happens when a system is working - people realise they can't beat it and give up. Of course it makes it really hard to evaluate, but sometimes the system breaks and then you can see the difference.