Crypto is for when you have an enemy that is powerful enough tamper with your communications. It's useful in those circumstances, e.g. Chinese journalists poste

Crypto is for when you have an enemy that is powerful enough tamper with your communications. It's useful in those circumstances, e.g. Chinese journalists posted covid coverage on Ethereum to prevent the CCP from removing it. In the case described in the article, Russia is using it to keep their economy running despite western sanctions. You're not going to find a good use case for it which does not include an adversary as part of the story. But that doesn't mean it's just for criminals. Or maybe it does because this is the sort of adversary that writes laws, but sometimes the criminals are the good guys. For instance, if I wanted to set up a shadow government so that we had something to fall back on when we all stop paying our taxes in protest of the awful things our government is using that money for, it would involve a protcol where amending its constitution means getting the right set of cryptographic signatures together to publish an additional block on the chain that defined the constitution. Locking this sort of thing into a protocol prevents the kind of interference that we saw on Jan 6 2021 because if certification of change is distributed there's nowhere to attack.