It can be used to fund dissident movements, whistleblowers, getting people out of dangerous situations in foreign countries, etc. Those would be considered criminal by the governments in those jurisdictions but most of us wouldn’t consider that to be a moral crime. It’s basically when you want to hide transactions from the government or other people with power over you which usually means you’re buying drugs or people or guns but it could also mean you’re buying a means to escape a terrible situation. I would say that most uses like this are things that we would regard as crimes and problematic. Probably well over 90%. Of course most crypto holders are just using it as a investment asset which is more neutral.
There is a category that I think is a legitimate use of crypto which is anonymization in the face of incredibly pervasive corporate tracking. There are so many corporations that know so much about us and they are able to track us by as many means including financial ones and using crypto can be a way to purchase legitimate services while trying to hide your identity for a purely privacy reasons that aren’t actually covering up anything morally problematic.
Anyway to the topic of the thread I think it was obvious the time that Trump was creating these meme coins specifically so that foreign actors could buy up most of the stock of these coins and then Trump would sell first and cash them out and then the coin would crash. Basically money laundering disguised as a pump and dump. Trump is so thoroughly corrupt and criminal that he essentially uses one crime, a pump and dump, to mask another crime, money laundering, as payment for yet another vastly more serious crime, selling state favor or state secrets to other hostile State actors. It’s actually kind of incredible when you think about it. It’s a whole chain of incredible corruption that’s pretty easy to see and yet we’re barely even talking about it. Almost certainly those Trump coins were bought up by people like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and who knows who else for favors from Trump at the cost of the American people.