Blockchain partially solves the problem of laundering illicit funds. The most popular use case I’ve seen is receiving ransoms.
You didn't need to say illicit funds. It's useful to move money without having to use a bank or government money.
Paying off ransomware software is.
And we can see this in the fact that buying goods and services from traditional (not darknet) vendors is still very hard with bitcoin. Paying randsomware in bitcoin is standard.
If you are a bank or government you have to look out for yourself, and so a fair amount of blockchain hype specifically addresses the low-trust transactions they encounter. There is some quiet adoption happening globally, and mostly invisibly to consumers.
The side effect, of course, is that it's easy for anyone to do bank-like things with the tech, including ransomware.
My main area of skepticism regarding this proposed use case is that a blockchain is an immutable public ledger, and thus with enough sleuthing, it is probably quite traceable. Indeed many criminals have later been apprehended through monitoring bitcoin transactions.
The world has had thousands of years to come up with solutions to trust problems during transactions. They are solutions that work. They work for criminals too, but its a lot harder to use them, especially over the internet, because everyone providing the services goes to jail if they are transacting with criminals.
Unless the whole transaction is anonymous, you can do the same with bitcoin.
> or using escrow agents
Which costs you extra.
Not making a value judgement, just pointing things out.
Yes of course - but the question was what value does bitcoin add over normal money, not /name things you cannot do with bitcoin/.