>Money laundering They don't need bitcoin for that. Smuggling money into the US (the by far largest global destination for laundered money) via crypto requires

>Money laundering They don't need bitcoin for that. Smuggling money into the US (the by far largest global destination for laundered money) via crypto requires the exact same amount of criminal effort (false identities, mules,..) as smuggling money through regular bank transfers, because nowadays all crypto exchanges that are allowed to interact with US banks must establish the identity of their customers same as a regular bank. So that leaves P2P trades. Their volume can be estimated (in fact: upper bounded, by adding all trades on the block chain and subtracting those corresponding to trades on known centralized exchanges.) It's about $200B per year. As for money laundering, the range of estimates of global volume per year is pretty wide, ranging from $20B to $5T. If you compare research from the 90s and today, you'll notice that the estimates have not changed, meaning: similar methodology applied to current data will yield estimates that are close to the estimates from the 1990s, adjusted for inflation. If the low end estimates are true, then money laundering is not a serious problem and using it as pretext for destroying civil rights is a joke, so let's go with the UN's reasonably big estimate: $800 billion - $2 trillion. In that case, even if *ALL* P2P bitcoin trades were criminal, they would still only amount to 10%-20% of global money laundering. Finally: The total BTC market cap is ~$400B, half of that has not been traded since 2015. Given the risk affinity of career criminal and the inherent volatility of criminal enterprise and given the historical rise of BTC, don't you think at least 10% of mone launderers would keep at least 10% of their money laundering transactions as crypto instead of cashing all of it out into USD? But they wouldn't keep them on exchanges. Looking at the blockchain data, it's difficult to make that work *UNLESS* only a small amount (less than $100B) money laundering happens via crypto.