It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.
The total market cap of ALL crypto is about 1 trillion today. So money laundering at a thousands of billions scale cannot use crypto.
Blame both.
USD is by far the most popular currency used for crime. It has stable price, accepted everywhere, and lacks a public ledger.
The internet got its start as a government weapon in the Cold War?
With The Merge, that no longer the case, and this is good for Ethereum and for cryptocurrency community.
https://decrypt.co/66411/cia-bitcoin-surveillance
> Michael Morell, who was previously the CIA’s acting director, said in ‘An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Use in Illicit Finance’ that “blockchain technology is a powerful but underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity and bring criminals to justice.”
> Tracking illicit Bitcoin transactions is therefore easier than tracing illegal funds moved across borders using “traditional banking transactions” and “far easier” than trying to follow cash, according to the report.
> One source in the report was quoted saying that “if all criminals used blockchain, we could wipe out illicit financial activity.”
TL;DR cash is a better tool for crime according to an ex CIA director
If you want to talk about actively making the world worse look at most web2 "algorithms" and how the push to the extremes is tolerated by "but numbers go up."
You're right, it's an impressive piece technology that's been growing through questionable use cases. But that's not the fault of the underlying technology, but of the actors involved.
As long as blockchains are treated as a second class citizen, governments choose to ostracize it, financial oligopolies lobby against it, things won't change.
But imagine what could be accomplished if governments decided to embrace and properly regulate it, and what it could empower in our society in terms of a more open and acessible socio-economic environment.
Let's not blame the technology.
That sounds like something people say to defend guns, nukes, and crypto. Why wouldn't you blame a technology whose primary use is malignant?
It's not like the crypto hellscape we have now was an accident of its evolution. It was the inevitable and predictable outcome of a decentralized and poorly regulated system built atop complex code that the average person has little chance of properly evaluating.
From all appearances, this is exactly how they were designed and exactly the point, to extract money from fools and funnel it to a select few crypto bankers. That's not a good thing.