I know some pretty sharp folks who fork for various police departments chasing illicit crypto related activity. The amount of stuff they can track including timing of transactions, entry and exit points, etc, and so over a long period of time means that most of the traditional anyonmization methods like tumblers simply do not work. Eventually someone, somewhere makes a mistake and the transactions and wallets can be traced.

If you have dirty money to hide, it's much better to hide it in a bank in Panama, or fill a sports bag with gold bars and fly it out on your private jet than use crypto.

Anything you can do from your bedroom, police can track from theirs.

Bitcoin is traceable by design. That's how a public ledger works. It is merely pseudonymous. But it leaves complete public money trail. If your Bitcoin ever associate with your real identity, which they tend to do when you actually use them, your anonymity is gone.

There is a reason why Monero exists.

I don’t understand the point of this. It is no different than traditional finance.

People do and did transfer drug money before and they will keep transferring drug money. I don’t see what blockchain has to do with that.

On the other hand, I use blockchain personally for completely legal purposes and find it very useful.

Easy to do international transfers, easy to buy different currencies even if local government is trying to make it hard. Also I have more trust in it compared to countries that I live in or travel to.

Another big aspect of it is no hidden costs and borderline scamming behavior I get from credit card companies or banks when doing international spending or transfers. This is not even about the insane prices, the feeling of getting scammed is even worse.

Also it is literally governments reason of existence to preserve order and catch criminals. Banning everything used by criminals is insanely stupid.

Same idea with cryptography, same with internet, same with cash.

Every single transaction is public information. If you carry a wallet into Iran, and it's coins are used through 20 different transactions to purchase weapons, all of those can be traced back to their origin.