Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some from people who operate outside of the law... also from people who lack access to good banking and payments infrastructure What do you suppose that ratio to be in terms of e.g. transaction volume? Personally I think it's >90 : <10 (scams : sympathetic). Others seem to think the balance is very different, or that it _could_ be different some day and that alone is a reason to "leave it alone".
I personally don’t have an opinion on the ratio, but there are many reports estimating that the illicit to legal ratio is much lower than you suspect. Either way I actually don’t care that much, I think access to the financial system is a human right, and not one that governments or US corporates should be able to arbitrarily remove. Crypto is the only thing we have that is remotely close to preserving the rights tha…
I think it goes quite a bit beyond that, or rather, the digital and physical realm are not mere 1:1 mirror images of each other.
For example in the physical realm it is really difficult to move millions of dollars of cash from one place to another particularly across prominent geographic or national boundaries (oceans, mountains, countries); the difficulty scales with the amount. Do people have this "right"? Sure, I guess, but in practice and as history has shown us, they've never been able to exercise it.
It's more or less trivial to move huge sums with crypto.