Crypto is not effective for organized crime or money laundering - it’s not backed by enough real money to be effective

David Gerard (author of: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain), Cryptocurrency Is No Fix for Russia’s Sanctions Woes, Foreign Policy, March 3, 2022, 2:58 PM.

Money laundering for criminals and other bad actors is not a new idea. At its core, it is the process of turning dirty money you can’t use into clean money you can use. Cryptocurrency has sometimes been a useful tool for this, but it stumbles at the last hurdle: getting actual money out at the other end, and not just another crypto. The volume of the crypto economy is just too small; there aren’t enough actual dollars. When headlines speak of millions or billions of dollars in crypto-tokens, these often aren’t dollars in any realizable sense. They’re abstract value in the way that, say, a private-equity unicorn company like Theranos was once “worth” $10 billion. Turning this mark-to-market value into money you can spend is difficult even if you do it all entirely aboveboard.