&gt; Why is BitCoin often associated with money laundering, as you say:<p>Because it&#x27;s the &#x27;unique&#x27; element of the story.<p>i.e., a million money laundering and fraud schemes are reported on every year, but the specific currency isn&#x27;t mentioned. No article states &#x27;ten arrested over dollar money-laundering allegations&#x27;.<p>But if it&#x27;s bitcoin, it&#x27;s interesting to mention. It&#x27;s quite similar to how say minorities are reported on when it comes to criminal news, in my country for example you&#x27;ll never hear &#x27;5 white men robbed a person&#x27;, but if it&#x27;s an immigrant, a muslim, a refugee, it&#x27;s much more likely that somewhere his heritage is reported. Because it&#x27;s exactly this element that separates them from the &#x27;regular&#x27; news of the majority ethnicity. In the same way, bitcoin is the element that separates it from the regular money laundering news, so it&#x27;s highlighted in the reporting.<p>None of it is untrue, but it&#x27;s quite easy to appreciate how this frames the issue. Anytime there&#x27;s financial fraud in dollar-denominated accounts, it&#x27;s &#x27;just financial fraud&#x27;, when it&#x27;s in bitcoin it&#x27;s not &#x27;just financial fraud&#x27; but &#x27;bitcoin fraud&#x27;. So now you have a world in which majority currencies aren&#x27;t specified or highlighted in negative reporting, but minority currencies are.<p>For example, the article is on the Netherlands, in this particular case about $20m is estimated to have been involved, part of it laundered through bitcoin, part of it through various fiat currencies and luxury goods. Is $20m significant? Well let&#x27;s go back 6 years to 2010, when a bitcoin costed $0.04 (today around $400) and was virtually non-existent. At the time the Netherlands invested about $100m into improving the ability to track and prosecute money-launderers. (already you can see, if a government invests $75m to fix a problem, you can be rest-assured that $20m is a tiny part of the problem). At the time the police also estimated that in the Netherlands alone about $20 billion was laundered. As such, this bitcoin laundering case, the first of this magnitude I&#x27;m aware of in the Netherlands in years, consists of just 0.1% of the annual money laundering.