I don't want to sound like a smartass but you need to get out more. There aren't large enough margins for
you to imagine risking federal prison. Read enough criminal cases and you'll be astonished at what people get up to and the risks they're willing to accept.
There was a guy in my neighborhood who was a politician - first on the school board, then a city supervisor, then a state legislator. A real American success story - straight As in school, first from his community to succeed in getting elective office and worked very hard for his constituents, a guy who'd be outside the subway station at 6am during election season on his own to shake your hand and ask for your vote (which was the last time I met him in fact).
Anyway, he's currently sitting in federal prison for arms trading in automatic weapons and rocket-launchers which he bought from Islamic rebels in the Philippines and attempted to resell to the FBI. Why? Because under his pillar-of-the-community exterior, he secretly longed to live the life of a gangster/warlord and had dreams of disappearing off to the jungle to do it full time. I swear to you that I'm not exaggerating even a little bit.
Now for general adoption of a crypto currency you're right, most people don't want to deal with anything riskier than buying weed or driving on an expired license. But consider that it may only need a small number of people with a very different risk calculus to create a viable marketplace.
When I say crypto isn't contraband, I mean that people's attitude toward it is different. If you are caught with contraband lots of people will say 'tough, that contraband is illegal to possess for good reasons you bad person.' But if you are caught with illegal cryptocurrency that you acquired in some otherwise legal business activity (just getting paid in coin rather than $), that won't seem like that big of a moral issue to most people. That creates a problem for prosecutors, since jurors might choose not to convict.
That's correct. However, we are discussing using a blockchain to run a company that 'can't be shut down'. What exactly would you be selling, that makes it worth the trouble?
Nothing, necessarily. Suppose that rather than trafficking in goods my intention were to undermine existing currencies through legal competition. In a way the high utility of cryptocurrency for black-market transactions is a drawback because it delays popular adoption due to guilt by association. Then again, that's probably just as well while the technical and philosophical wrinkles are ironed out.