It is the first thing almost everyone says, and it is a reasonable thing to say, because for about a decade the only crypto stories that made the news were about crime. But the objection rests on an assumption that turns out to be the wrong way round.
A public blockchain is a permanent, published record of every transaction that has ever happened on it. Not a private ledger a company keeps. Not something a regulator has to subpoena. A list, visible to anyone, for ever, that nobody can edit.
Now think about what a criminal actually wants. They want the money to be untraceable. A permanent public record of every movement is the single worst place to put it.
This is not a theory
It is how a great many cases have been solved. Investigators follow the chain, because the chain is right there. Money that moved through a mixer, across borders, through a dozen wallets, still leaves a trail — and unlike cash, the trail does not go cold. It sits there waiting, and it gets warmer as analysis tools improve. People have been arrested years later on transactions they made before anyone was looking.
Analytics firms that track this for a living have consistently put illicit activity at well under one per cent of crypto transaction volume. Compare that with cash, where the honest answer is that nobody knows, because cash leaves no record to count.
Cash is the untraceable one. It always was. We are simply used to it.
And the edges are checked
There is a second thing people tend not to know: getting money in and out is regulated, and has been for years.
Exchanges in the UK must register with the Financial Conduct Authority, run anti-money-laundering checks, verify who their customers are and report suspicious activity — the same obligations a bank has. Buying stablecoins and converting them back into ordinary money both happen through firms that know exactly who you are.
So the picture is nearly the reverse of the reputation. The middle is a permanent public record, and the edges are identity-checked by regulated firms. What a criminal actually wants is an envelope of twenties, which nobody has to register with anyone to hand over.
What about the anonymity, then?
Half true, and worth being precise about. A wallet address is not your name. But every transaction that address ever makes is public and permanent, so the moment it touches anything that knows who you are — an exchange, a purchase with a delivery address, a payment to a business — the whole history attaches to a person.
Privacy on a public chain is more like a pen name than a mask. It works right up until it does not, and then it works backwards through everything you have ever done.
None of which means nothing bad ever happens. Fraud exists, scams exist, and people lose money to both. The same is true of bank transfers, which are used for far more fraud by value.
The claim worth rejecting is not "crime happens here". It is the much stronger one — that this is primarily a criminal technology — and that one does not survive contact with how the technology actually works.
Why this matters if you are just buying coffee
Because it is the reason a lot of perfectly sensible businesses have not looked at any of this. Not the fees, not the technology, not the effort. The association.
A café owner does not want to explain to their accountant, their bank or their mum why they are taking payments in something they read was used by criminals. That hesitation is understandable, and it costs them between one and a half and three per cent of everything they sell, every year, for ever.
Ceodore is built for businesses that want the lower fees and the instant settlement without the baggage. It looks like accounting software, because that is what it is.