Where the one percent comes from
When crime comes up, the industry's answer is that criminal money makes up about one percent of all crypto turnover. The figure is honest, and that is what I say in the book. What matters is what the percentage is taken of. Turnover is almost entirely speculation, where the same coins change hands many times a day, and every resale inflates the denominator. The fraud on exchanges, ICOs and memecoins, meanwhile, runs through perfectly clean wallets and never enters that percentage at all (“Prologue. The Plane Never Landed”).
Someone who bought a trap coin on an exchange paid from an ordinary wallet. The money taken from him looks like ordinary trading in the statistics.
Numbers that do not fit into that percentage
Chainalysis analysts calculated that in 2025 alone at least 154 billion dollars flowed into wallets linked to criminal activity. In the same year the FBI received more than 180,000 complaints from Americans about crypto fraud, totalling more than 11 billion dollars. The firm Solidus Labs examined seven million coins launched on pump.fun over a little more than a year, and more than 98 percent of them turned out to be traps in which the creator pumps the price, sells his share to those who believed, and vanishes. The ICO era looked only slightly better: back in 2018 analysts at Satis Group classified about three quarters of large projects as scams (same prologue).
Some trades show it even more plainly. By Chainalysis's count, ransomware gangs were paid more than a billion dollars in 2023 (chapter “Employee of the Month”). A Telegram marketplace selling everything needed for fraud moved more than 27 billion dollars in USDT, and Chainalysis counted at least 49 billion since 2021 (chapter “Pig Butchering”).
Where crypto is honestly useful
Between mid-2023 and mid-2024 more than sixty percent of all crypto transactions in Argentina were in stablecoins, digital dollars such as USDT and USDC. Argentines were doing what their grandmothers did with cash dollars, only with an app instead of a street money-changer (chapter “Dollars for Those Who Have None”). In the year from spring 2023, Turks bought about 38 billion dollars' worth of stablecoins. A migrant sending 200 dollars home gives intermediaries 6.5 percent on average, according to the World Bank, while a stablecoin transfer takes minutes and costs cents.
That usefulness is real, and it is not small. Millions of people in countries with bad money got access to good money. Only that good money was not invented by Satoshi. It is the American dollar, and the blockchain serves as its envelope (same chapter).
My answer
I have watched crypto from the inside since 2010, when my laptop mined a hundred bitcoins. Satoshi's invention was real; he solved a problem cryptographers had struggled with for twenty years. But the invention had no will of its own. It passed to people, and people found it the uses they needed most. Drug dealers came first, because they needed a payment that could not be reversed, then extortionists, because they needed a payment the bank could not see (“Finale. I Was Wrong”).
So this is how I answer the question in the title. Crime is a small share of turnover, but turnover says little about who really needs crypto. Count the people for whom it met a real need, and first on that list come those the banks turned away, many of whom were turned away for good reason. The honest part exists as well, and there is most of it wherever a digital dollar has replaced a bad local currency.
