The Availability Bias We Cannot Seem to Shake
In the episode, Rasmus Risager Lindegaard, product manager at Lunar's crypto division, offers a precise reframing of this problem. Early Bitcoin crime rates were indeed alarming, around 30%. But that figure didn't reveal anything stable about the technology. It revealed that criminals were early adopters of any anonymous-seeming tool. As Rasmus notes, "companies have grown up" and "law enforcement has shown that they're able to go in and confiscate some of these funds." What changed was not the ledger. It was the exits. To convert Bitcoin into something you can actually spend in the real world, you have to hit a centralised exchange. And centralised exchanges have AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) obligations in most jurisdictions. The crime rate dropped not because blockchain became more private, but because the infrastructure around it became more regulated.
This is availability bias in action. The Nigerian prince email scams were ancient history by the time Bitcoin arrived, but the template remained irresistible to fraudsters. A new, poorly understood technology offered the perfect narrative hook. "Bitcoin has gone through the roof," the headlines screamed. "Someone made 10,000% returns overnight." That story made it trivially easy for criminals to recruit marks. As Rasmus points out, many high-profile "crypto fraud" cases in the Nordics involved elderly people who were simply told that Bitcoin would double their money in a day. No actual cryptocurrency transaction occurred. The crypto was just the pretext. But the media narrative made the pretext work.
The Same Pattern Shows Up Everywhere
This pattern repeats whenever technologies threaten incumbent systems. We fear planes more than cars, despite cars being statistically far deadlier. We fear sharks despite vending machines killing more people annually. The mechanism is always the same. A new technology generates dramatic stories and media coverage. The coverage creates availability heuristic in our minds. The more salient the threat, the more real it feels.
The difference here is that the statistics actively contradict the narrative. Rasmus cites data from Chainalysis showing that blockchain crime is now estimated at less than 1% of transactions. Compare that to the 2-5% of traditional money estimated to be criminal in origin. "That just goes to say how in transparent the general banking system is," Rasmus observes. Traditional finance moves money through hundreds of small, centralised databases with varying standards. Blockchains move it on permanent, auditable ledgers. One is actually more traceable. The other merely feels more mysterious.
When Evidence Changes, Our Fear Should Too
The real problem is not crypto's crime potential. It is our failure to update our threat model when new evidence arrives. We learned to fear crypto when it was genuinely murky and genuinely high-risk. But the facts changed. The technology matured. The regulation caught up. And yet the fear persisted. That gap between what we believe and what the data shows is where we should be paying attention.
This doesn't mean crypto has no downsides. Energy consumption was genuine until Ethereum's recent proof-of-stake merge. Scalability is still a limiting factor for some use cases. The regulatory landscape remains uncertain in many jurisdictions. But "crime" has stopped being the credible objection, if it ever was. When your actual risk is dwarfed by the risk in the incumbent system, the fear becomes less about the technology and more about what that technology threatens. And that's a fear worth examining.