It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.
Let's be realistic here, most of dictators evading sanctions do it (i) with good ol' bags of $/€/CHF/£, (ii) gold/platinum/diamonds/..., (iii) whatever ad-hoc currency satisfies the two parties (promises, shares, goods, ...); in short everything but traceable-in-the-open digital currencies where most of the in/egress feature mandatory KYC.
If you believe e.g. that the US/EU firms still doing business in Russia are doing it in ETH/BTC, I have a port in Serbia to sell you.
If you are in the circles where having to move $10M illegally is a common occurrence, paying a guy $10k to take a train between Russia and China with a bag of cash and bribe the border guards another $10k is much better than trying to weasel your way through the KYC process of Coinbase.
But I wouldn't.
Of course, people there may use it for that purpose, but that demand is a negligible part of the overall demand for cryptocurrencies.
Actual definition: In the Western world, a "criminal" is any person tried and convicted of breaking the law.
Your definition is, however, correct for how it sometimes works and how "they" would like it to work. (where your use of the word "mandate" means "whichever direction the wind is currently blowing").
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w293...
> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
That source says, when it comes to the demand in terms of spending crypto for goods or services:
> 46% of transactions are due to illegal transactions
If Bob transfers $10 back and forth between both of his bank accounts 99 times and then buys $10 worth of crack, would you say that 1% of Bobs money was used for illegal purposes or 100% of it was used for illegal purposes? Depends on what specifically you're trying to measure.
There are two things here that are simultaneously true:
1. A small percent of BTC transactions are for illicit purposes.
2. A large percentage of the goods and services purchased with BTC are illicit.
"We first document that 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities".
How much of the actually meaningful use is legal? E.g. buying good and services, not evading laws, regulations, sales taxes etc.
Global GDP is $101T. Global yearly forex volume is $2738T. So by this logic you should conclude that 96% of transaction volume in the traditional financial system is also not tied to economically meaningful activities. You're going to be disappointed if you want to believe society as a whole is any less financialized than bitcoin.
What do you think would be an acceptable percentage of speculation?
https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/forex-trading/statistics...
Surely what we actually care about is how many useful, legal, meaningful transactions there are.
For example if for every 1 legal transaction there is 3 illegal transactions and 96 speculative or maintenance transactions... it starts looking like this is predominantly for criminal uses even though only 3% of transactions are criminal.
Why didn't you name one?
If you're buying illegal black market shit, you're darn well gonna do it using the Red, White, and Blue's Green!
This is also proof of cryptocurrency's use-case as a method of value transfer (ie. currency). Crime and porn are the traditional testing grounds for new disruptive technologies. I remember this thing called the Internet...