By the way, I doubt that bitcoin had ever had more than a percent or two involved in criminal activities, and sure it would not really be an easy dynamic to measure.. but of course, the mainstream media would have hardly been credible in its historical representations about what is bitcoin or about how bitcoin was supposedly being used... so surely in the reliance upon deceptive mainstream media representations (maybe interviewing a nocoiner or a bitcoin naysayer as if such a person was representative of actual objective knowledge), we may well have concluded that at least 70% of bitcoin's usage was either criminal or had criminal intentions, even if then being used by grandmas.
I am not really sure how much of it is true but when I read about it on the internet around 2 years ago they said that the bitcoins used for criminal activities accounted for a 40% in the beginning.
Since then the bitcoin usage for criminal activities has decreased to less than 10%.
But anyway, it's good to see that the number has decreased to less than 1%. I think most of the credit for it goes to the traders and investors.
It seems to me that you are starting with a bad framework in the first place to even presume that the criminal element rate in bitcoin has come down at all. In other words, the criminal rate in bitcoin was likely never high, but only a myth spread by bitcoin naysayers and nocoiners... and they can fuck off with their nonsense.
I will grant that regarding greater and greater adoption, we have likely gotten more and more mainstream usage of bitcoin; however, bitcoin still remains a pretty damned niche item - and not very widely adopted, and also not very widely able to be used. Of course, there are some niches in which bitcoin is able to be used more and likely to be adopted more because of such usage - which would include some of the happenings in El Salvador with the greater abilities to send and receive with hardly any fees - and also some various incentive creations (even through the El Salvador government) to attempt to get bitcoin used more and more easily.
I would like to make one more point in terms of trying to compare bitcoin with the usage of cash, and we know that the anonymity of cash allows it to be used in various crimes, yet on a personal level, it seems to me to be much more preferable to have the ability to use cash - because privacy is important, and there are a variety ways that there are attempts to vilify cash and even our own behaviors have been to use cash less and less and less, so in those regards, we have been using more and more of our privacy - and surely any kinds of moves of central bank digital currencies are not going to have abilities to preserve privacy like cash does... but bitcoin does have those abilities, which also makes it more of an amazing phenomena in terms of the preservation of privacy.
Maybe it is worth pointing out that focusing on increases or decreases in bitcoin being used in criminal endeavors is likely a pretty damned BIG ASS distraction - because I personally believe that it remains way more important to focus on ways to enhance, enable and preserve privacy rather than getting trapped in some kind of false dilemmas, including desires for less criminal activities, in which your focus on such vague concepts likely causes you to under appreciate more important values in regards to privacy and being able to have some freedoms that are associated with privacy without having to necessarily presume that so many people are bad and causing losses of freedoms to a lot of normies who deserve to live with various ways to enjoy privacy in their value transactions.. without being presumed a criminal merely because they want privacy and they value privacy and they want the same for other people to be able to enjoy and have available means to transact with privacy.