> And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. ...

I suspect Krugman is being deliberately dishonest here. The use case is censorship-resistant money. Not just money laundering, but any use of money outside national jurisdiction. This includes routing around capital controls, civil asset forfeiture threats, and increasingly draconian financial surveillance. Not just in developing countries and in dictatorships, but in western-style democracies.

It's understandable that the privileged like Krugman hate this idea. It's not unlike thinking that the Internet's effect on the economy will be no greater than the fax machine. Krugman wasn't the target user then and he isn't now.