The recent ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS led to a flurry of calls to ban Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency generally) as enabling and incentivizing these attacks.[1] Given the difficulty of tracking the perpetrators, the argument goes, cryptocurrency is a uniquely appealing method of payment to hackers. Take away the hackers’ easy ability to get paid and you reduce the incentive to carry out the attack. Bitcoin defenders point out that lots of things are used in criminal activity that we aren’t prepared to ban. Cryptocurrency critics reply that, for all its promise, cryptocurrency remains devoid of a single positive use case, and that its primary uses are for speculative investment and criminal activity.[2] On Sunday, June 6, former President Trump remarked that Bitcoin was “a scam” that competed with the U.S. dollar.[3] Then on Monday, June 7, federal authorities announced that they had traced and seized