"vast majority" is very weak statement.
Vast majority of cars did not get stolen last year.
Vast majority of cars did not get stolen last year.
private payments just make ransomware payments easier. they don't create a new source of the criminal intent.
should we, therefore, not improve global access to food and healthcare because some of the people whose actions would be empowered by it are criminals?
plus, private payments are in theory a literal requirement for soundness of the money system due to fungibility concerns, and also, you might argue, a requirement to protect the freedoms of certain people such as abused spouses.
there might be some sufficiently important human rights issues that only a censorship resistant private money system can solve... and I'm not sure if ransomware increases are really much to do with the availability of digital currencies so much as a symptom of other social problems. it's somewhat a question of whether solving e.g. ransomware issues is worth the effort if it means we get the other humanitarian solutions and social benefits from something like Monero.
In this case we'd need to relate it to normal asset/currency transactions. Is the rate of illegitimate transactions the same? 10X? 1000X? It can have several orders of magnitude more illegitimate activity while the statement 'the vast majority....' remains true.
Its more important that the US Deputy Treasury Secretary has intelligently differentiated between sanctionable centralized institutions and the network itself. A lot of people have talked themselves out of cryptocurrency by imagining that the [US] government would attack or outlaw the networks themselves, instead of acknowledging their legitimacy, and supported that with the imagination that the vast majority of use was illegitimate.
The only one who is moving goal posts is you, who have somehow setup this strawman that the collective position on HN was that the vast majority of crypto was illicit use.