Even the most Pollyanna reports from firms that exist to ‘fight’ crime say it 2% criminal. I don’t know how much of that is illegal source versus regulatory evasion. World black market GDP is estimated somewhere around 25%.

And it make sense that it would be so low. Let’s say you just got $1M in Bitcoin and you have to pay your suppliers $500k in cold cash. Not going to happen. Only from other criminals that take profits in cash. But there is obviously a limit to that. I think the point is that those 2% can help a lot in fighting the 25%.

The fear is that illegal commerce could be conducted without fiat conversion. That would require that regular commerce would also be done in the same currency that the criminals use. This is fiat’s game to lose.

And by the way, this is why I love crypto. It has promise as an amazing technology for choosing financial participation according to personal and private community values. Although I’ll admit we’re not there yet, and a lot of the stuff might now be owned by people we wouldn’t want to have power over us. We’re still in the phase of speculation and fear and power struggles. I just hope that fear of the old power structures doesn’t bring good people to ally with values that we would not want in a new system.