This doesn't look very serious, op, but the topic is relevant, and I think that people here can at least refer to some things you should pay attention to. While cryptos are used for financial crimes, of course, the question you should ask is the following: are cryptos indeed special in being used for financial crimes, or are they used roughly just as any other form of money is used? Then research how much money is laundered via banks every year (spoiler: the hell lot), how much is laundered in which cryptos, and what criminals tend to prefer in terms of currencies and forms (spoiler: cash is still very relevant). Just try to remain objective, op, and not write another ill-grounded article on how cryptos help commit financial crimes.

If someone can't put up with BTC volatility, maybe the crypto market isn't a good option for that person. Yes, Bitcoin is volatile, and it will likely remain volatile for years. I got to terms with it in 2018, and since then I'm not very concerned with the volatility. Some also greatly benefit from BTC volatility, as it allows good traders to profit from short-term changes. For long-term hodlers, volatility should not mean anything because what matters is that over the years, Bitcoin continues growing. Nobody needs to step up, certainly not governments. Those who get too nervous from volatility should just stay away from the market.

I used to keep my money in the Blockchain wallet, and I was okay with it. I had my pass phrase, password, 2FA. Then there was a time when I wanted to access my wallet, but the code from Blockchain just didn't arrive to my phone, and the email confirmation didn't arrive either. It was a technical issue, of course, and everything arrived the next day, but that's when I decided to move to Electrum, at least. I'm glad I did that, given how Blockchain is starting to involve KYC, reporting taxes and stuff. But as for the safety of storing money on Blockchain, I do believe they don't have access to passphrases and that technically the coins do belong to customers. Still, though, why risk it if there are good alternatives.

Honestly, at some point I even stopped considering it significant when Bitcoin or crypto is mentioned in a TV show. There were a few TV shows that are strongly related to cryptos (Mr Robot, Silicon Valley), and many more that paid some attention to them. The most recent show I've seen (Only Murders in the Building) also briefly mentioned a guy accepting cryptocurrency payments for his counseling sessions. I like it that recent shows don't even take time to explain what cryptos are, and just mention them, expecting the audience to at least roughly know what they're talking about. And while I'd agree it means there's a certain fashion for Bitcoin, it doesn't mean that it's globally adopted and widely interesting to people around the world.

I don't mind Elon Musk, but I'd say he is not very good for the crypto industry. He can make things go up or down, tease with investments or opportunities and then move on, and other things like that. Jack, on the other hand, is clearly pro-Bitcoin, so I wouldn't want Musk to have more power over Twitter than he already has. After all, he is the biggest individual shareholder, right? Not to mention his popularity of Twitter, which is huge. So I don't think this will happen, and I hope Twitter will remain somewhat independent of this guy's wishes.

I wouldn't go as far as to say it'll always be the norm. After all, even though it seems that fiat has been more of less around since the 7th century in China, there have been around 150 years of great popularity in the West of the gold standard of money, and the US, famously, abandoned the standard and went for fiat in the early 70s of the previous century. Some there can easily come a period of time when fiat gets abandoned in various countries. But I don't think this time is near, so I do agree fiat will probably remain the norm for decades to come. And I agree even more that people are not ready to abandon fiat for cryptos. Some are, but the vast majority certainly aren't. I don't think there's a way of fixing it, though.

If someone gets the phrase, nothing will stop this person from getting the money, I believe. Because one can just go with the seed phrase to Electrum, and recover the wallet. So additional measures are not very helpful this way. It's possible to set a password, set a 2FA, etc., but I don't think it helps, ultimately. Moreover, if someone did make such measures unavoidable, it can lock one out of one's own wallet because of not having access to a phone with which the 2FA was set or forgetting the password. As for a fingerprint, not all devices allow this identification yet, so it can limit access to one's coins, but overall it might not be a bad idea. Then again, some here say fingerprint ID isn't as safe as it seems, so I'm not sure.

I guess the govs are not okay with stablecoins being under someone else's control and not truly being backed by fiat or anything of value on the required level, so they want to do it their way. But internationally, I think there's more trust to stable coins because they are not controlled by governments. CBDCs work for local markets largely, IMO, whereas CBDCs are something used internationally. So even they, IMO, aren't competing against one another, even though they have some similarities.

I'd actually like that option, the one with USDT, because that would diverge negative attention and reputation losses from Bitcoin onto something I don't care much about. But it seems that cryptos won't actually play a part in this anyway. Some countries, unfortunately, agree to pay in rubles (Hungary), some are being very brave and abandoning Russian gas (Lithuania), and some are just paying in euros as usual, but then these euros can be converted by Russian Gazprombank into rubles (Germany). Cryptos were briefly mentioned as an option some time ago, but it was in context of Russia-friendly countries, and I think this direction wasn't pursued after all. I do hope that the question of paying Russia for gas will become irrelevant soon because countries will stop buying it.

Op, good for you if that's really the case, and you can abandon banks. I know that I can't, not under current conditions. In my country, you need a bank account to receive a salary, it's obligatory in most places. Now, I'm doing some research, and to receive my grant I also, of course, needed a bank account. Also, I need it often to pay for important things online, such as to help my relatives right now, who are in Ukraine, and I often need to send money to someone's bank account (I could send BTC if they accepted BTC, but they don't). So I could abandon banks if there was enough freedom in terms of how to get a salary and how to pay for things online, but not right now, based on how things are done.

Op, can you formulate concisely what exactly constitutes the Catch 22 situation for cryptos, according to your opinion? Because, frankly, I don't see it. Also, not everyone believes that Bitcoin must become the dominant money of the world. It can be one of the payment options available, and that would be enough. And it can be both the store of value and the medium of exchange. This is often even the case with dollar, when people both use it as money and keep their savings in it, so why can't it happen for Bitcoin? Bitcoin is, after all, about financial freedom. And I think this freedom should also extend to the ways of using Bitcoin.

Mining has been quite centralized for a long time, but not enough to threaten the existence or integrity of Bitcoin, and centralized mining doesn't mean centralized Bitcoin. After all, there are also BTC owners, and the biggest owners don't seem to be the biggest miners. The institutionalization of mining seems natural to me, and as long as it's not a single decision-making center, it's fine. Also, to be honest, I thought that mining was way more centralized than these numbers are saying, believing that a couple of market giants have been controlling around half of all mining.

I think that the fighting of crimes should be reasonable. Namely, the fight should target big criminals, big sums of money, rather than fight small money launderers. It's about setting priorities, basically. So completely abandoning privacy and making checks on people who have at best a couple of thousand dollars on an exchange in not reasonable. But if there are big sums involved, asking for ID and other documentation makes sense, and the higher the sums, the bigger must be the requirements. So it should be  a fine balance that is beneficial to society.

To be fair, it wasn't Russia who announced the default, and Russia in fact went angry about being classified this way and threatened with legal action. And, even though I'm Ukrainian, I must admit that Russia makes a good point that the issue is not with being unable to pay (not having the money), but with artificial limitations set by the sanctions (not having USD). But what's good is that the very fact of classifying Russia as being under selective default can cause panic selling and withdrawals of investors from the Russian market.

It's good that there's another place of Earth that is Bitcoin-friendly, but I think that comparing it to El Salvador isn't very accurate. What's big about El Salvador is that it's a whole country, adopting Bitcoin on all its territory. But in Honduras, it's in a special economic zone, and I think that there've been multiple places around the world where cryptos are locally adopted, and it's normally a place with a high degree of economic autonomy or a tax-free zone.
So I'm not surprised that there was no price boost, following this news, and that it went relatively unnoticed overall.

Honestly, I'm not surprised about yuan. China is an autocratic regime, and it pays special attention to the digital space of its citizens. So if the government says people should use something, they'll use it. And since CBDC is under state's control, it's not weird that people are using it. What's more interesting is how popular a CBDC can become in a democracy, where many criticize their government and are wary of its new initiatives. But we're, IMO, very far from CBDCs becoming widespread and the era of CBDCs. Also, I agree with the op that as long as there's no anti-Bitcoin legislation, I'm fine with such projects appearing. In my mind, they're a potential replacement of classic fiat, not a competitor of decentralized currencies.

Op, before online exchanges became popular, I remember how people brought cash, made a BTC transaction on spot, and that's how things happened. Also, there are ATMs which don't technically require banks (right?). And if the banking system is fully out in a sense that fiat is also out, that would be great for Bitcoin because there wouldn't be a need to exchange it for anything other that goods and services directly. And Bitcoin is actually something people can use without banks, just sending money online directly from one wallet to another. That being said, I don't think banks will disappear any time soon if ever at all, so BTC will continue coexisting with them.

Op, thanks for breaking it down and for being attentive to research (certainly, more attentive than all those media you linked). Indeed, I understand the research the same way you did (that they targeted people with these traits in the first place, not found out that crypto investors normally display them). Also, 506 isn't a big sample, and I wonder how representative it is.
People at universities do all sorts of things, and sometimes it's legit research, while sometimes it's not. What's more important is to not misrepresent what the research was about, and not everyone is up to this task in the media, unfortunately.

Stablecoins like USDT manage to live up to their names so far and keep the price at a very stable level. What they don't do is they don't solve the inflation which fiat suffers from. So is USDT=$1, but the dollar's inflation is an 8%, it means that people actually lost around 8% of their purchasing power (roughly, but actually they could lose way more on certain products and way less on others). Also, the op's right of the hypothetical risk of a stable coin just exploding eventually, when there's a panic selling event and people realize that this stability of stable coins isn't really backed by dollars or anything else of significant value.

I heard a phrase which I really liked, it's that Russian global politics is based on national insecurity. So basically, Russia assumes that it, the largest country in the world and the largest nuclear power in the world, will be invaded by its neighbors if its borders aren't militarized enough and if its neighbors have the technical capability to invade it. But that's not how the 21st century world works! It's actually Russia that keeps invading other countries over alleged concerns around its own safety (Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022), while not facing any real threat. Ukraine did not invade and never intended to invade Russia, and neither do any other countries on Russia's Western borders. And Ukraine just has a right to exist, you know, and live its own life, but Russia doesn't think so.
Also, Vitalik donated $5 million worth of Ethereum to help Ukraine, by the way.

Actually, the funds are not going to the government, as the government would surely spend at least some of it on weapons, and Binance only supports the humanitarian cause. That being said, they did donate to Palianytsia, and this organization's website says all profits go to the Ukrainian Army It's funny how earlier donations say 'humanitarian aid', but the most recent ones do not.
I'm also glad to see that the International Committee of the Red Cross is not on the list, though, as after their solicitation with deportations of people from Ukraine and intentions to open a center to deal with Ukrainian refugees in Russia, Ukraine is asking people not to donate money to them.