"Freedom enables crime" is an entirely true argument, and a gift from heaven for The Powers That Be who need to justify the taking-away of Freedom.

The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.

I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.

Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.

Anonymous crypto, yes.

But if you're suggesting blockchain is anonymous and payments are untraceable, that's not the case for bitcoin at least. It's a gift to law enforcement, if they cared enough to trace btc transactions.

Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime. Having transcations on a ledger forever, works against your criminal take. You are just repeating.

It's nice and all, but the same people who are running the biggest ransomware operations now had no trouble receiving the billions of dollars they were stealing directly from US bank accounts before they pivoted to ransomware.

Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it's destination.

But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they'd pay for payment processing otherwise. I'm not sure that really makes a difference though.

only for privacy coins tho