Is Bitcoin used by criminals?

There is often public misconception that
Bitcoin is mostly used by criminals, but
nothing could be further from the truth. This
is mainly because many people think Bitcoin
is anonymous, when in fact it’s the opposite

• all Bitcoin transactions are transparent for
  the whole world to see. People might not be
  able to link the identity to Bitcoin right away
  (that is also why it is sometimes called
  ‘pseudo anonymous’), but once they do, they
  can track everything you’ve ever done on the
  Bitcoin network. This makes it a particularly
  bad tool for illicit use.
  While Bitcoin might actually turn out to be
  one of the safest and least ‘bad’ ways to use
  money, it doesn’t mean that criminals don’t
  use it. Just like normal money, they do. But
  there are two important things to note -
  firstly, that as more data becomes available
  in the industry, the more it is becoming clear
  the number of bad uses is very, very minute
• if the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is
  represented by a big mountain, the size of
  the bad parts is a couple of rocks. Second,
  that in any financial system, this is a risk
  that can never be eliminated, merely
  mitigated, and Bitcoin has some of the best
  tools in the world for that.
  It’s worth expanding on Bitcoin’s parallel
  with the internet particularly in the context
  of all the ‘bad stuff’ that people associate
  Bitcoin with. Is the internet all good?
  Definitely not. Terrorists, money launderers
  and drug smugglers use Facebook, Twitter
  and Whatsapp to communicate and
  coordinate every single day. Some people
  might feel uneasy about the fact that at
  least 5–30% of visible online traffic relates
  to pornography. And here we’re not even
  considering the deep and dark web, where
  there are all kinds of really bad things going
  on that we’re not going to even mention
  here.
  But despite all these issues, does society
  make a concerted effort to try and ban the
  internet? No. And it’s not so much because
  it’s hard to do so, it’s more because the
  positives to society grossly outweigh the
  negatives. For these same reasons, we
  should all be very careful how we think
  about Bitcoin, because most evidence
  suggests Bitcoin to have the same net
  positive effect, if not more, than the internet.
  Both the internet and Bitcoin are tools that
  can be used by the ‘bad guys’ or the ‘good
  guys’, and thankfully most of the world are
  in the latter category.
  Bitcoin is a lot safer than what
  most people think.