'I can't do anything with Bitcoin that I can't do more easily with my credit card.'
That's false as your credit card issuer controls who you can and cannot transact with. With BTC you control whom you transact with.
That's false as your credit card issuer controls who you can and cannot transact with. With BTC you control whom you transact with.
BTC was always about reducing control from a few centralized parties. I don't want my bank or paypal account being arbitrarily frozen.
Nowadays BTC is not very good at transactions due to exorbitant fees + very slow confirmation times, but things like ethereum, bitcoin cash, and altcoins offer options. ETH is very quick.
Good old fashioned cash is much better for criminal activity.
A crypto like Zcash (another fairly large crypto) that utilizes zk snarks to encrypt transactions and then decouple coins from their history would be much better suited for illegal transactions.
For Bitcoin like technologies completely lack privacy.