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.

My bad. I've should have added non-criminal. I'm sorry.

A criminal use is still a use. Some percent of gun sales are for criminal purposes. This counts as market demand just the same as any other sale. Precisely measuring how valuable this is to criminal enterprise is an interesting question.

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.

If it is a non criminal situation, you can generally use traditional methods to establish trust, such as using courts to sue people who rip you off, or using escrow agents, etc.

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.

> such as using courts to sue people who rip you off,

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.

> you can do the same with bitcoin.

Yes of course - but the question was what value does bitcoin add over normal money, not /name things you cannot do with bitcoin/.

In Belarus, it is criminal to donate to the opposition party or to the wounded protesters.

A fucked society is not fixed with bitcoin