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Lol! That is suspiciously specific.

You didn't need to say illicit funds. It's useful to move money without having to use a bank or government money.

It may be useful, but the generic case of transfering money is generally (but not always) not an example of a low trust situation.

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.

For most goods and services there are desirable properties to intermediaries in terms of fraud detection, refunds, etc. But it is ultimately reliant on the ultimate source of trust deriving from governments and banks.

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.

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