And fiat money can be used to deal drugs.

I mean I don't defend crypto, the way things are going is that they'll be just as regulated and centralized as digital fiat is, and a lot of it is people getting rich, or hoping to - I mean I'm one of those people, still waiting for my handful of dogecoin to go up 10.000% so I can retire. But I also have a regular job, regular savings, and regular stonks because savings account interest is a joke.

The exchanges can be regulated, but good luck trying to regulate a global peer to peer network!

You just need to regulate the end points. At some point, someone needs real money instead of robux.

Those are the exchanges I mentioned. But no, if it's widely enough used, it can be an entirely self contained system.

But it’s not widely used, that’s the whole problem.

Say you created a business accepting exclusively cryptocurrencies. You need to ship an item? You need “dirty fiat”. Let’s say you’re only selling NFTs or services, your hosting provider wants paid in real currency. Food? Housing? Utilities? Fiat. Fiat. Fiat.

Unless it’s accepted for the entire supply chain of LIFE, you’re screwed.

Look at bittorrent. While it's impossible to kill it, targeting agregation platforms definitely made the protocol immensely less relevant than it was 20 years ago.

BitTorrent made itself less relevant by relying on end to end networking and symmetrical links, neither of which panned out.

Such as? The Pirate Bay still exists as do thousands of other websites listing torrents.

BitTorrent traffic went down as streaming services increased.

Seems like a mix of port blocks and criminal penalties, while not killing cryptocurrency, would greatly hinder its overall utility and thus any associated fiscal value.

What these critics don't tell you is that the transactions of these cryptocurrencies are traceable and transparent making the majority of many cryptocurrencies pointless to use for 'committing financial crimes'.

Otherwise, why do you think that these criminals are turning to privacy coins like Monero and MobileCoin, etc?

It’s more that you found a legitimate use for Agent Orange.

Fun fact (and not to detract from your allegory), agent orange was widely used by Ontario Hydro from the fifties to late seventies to clear trees from around power lines. The people handling it weren’t really well-informed of what exactly it was or how dangerous it was, so there have been a number of lawsuits. I have an uncle who recalls being jokingly hosed down with the stuff on a hot day by a guy working a sprayer in the back of a truck. Whoops.

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1048075

Agent Orange isn't toxic (colloquially speaking) if it's manufactured properly and free of dioxins.

Curious - what is your use case?

Folks tend not to answer this question because they know it's not a good one.

Let's take bitpay, probably the largest and oldest merchant processing system for crypto transactions. They publish stats. [1]

- 40% of all of their transactions globally are for prepaid gift cards.

- 20% of all of their transactions globally are for "internet."

- 14% of all of their transactions globally are for "vpn."

So 75% of all of their transactions globally are for merchant categories closely associated with fraud. And the reason is obvious: it's slower, more expensive and less convenient than using a credit or debit card. So it self-selects.

Folks who "find a way to make it work" are usually ideological, in crypto (i.e. found other people who don't care that it's impractical or criminal) or have otherwise found ways of "processing crypto transactions" (i.e. using bitpay where the merchants do not receive crypto because of course they don't why would they).

[1] https://bitpay.com/stats/