I do think that coins with more reasonable transaction fees are actually used as normal, boring currency a lot more than crypto-naysayers think.
I also think the rampant speculation going on over coins like Doge is nuts, but it's worthwhile keeping in mind that if you're just using crypto as an exchange of value, with the purchase of the coin and its use at the same time, it doesn't really matter what the spot price is.
Where by constrained you mean it's a crime, right? Obviously you can argue that in this specific instance making it easier for criminals to evade law enforcement is a morally good thing, but cryptocurrency does the same thing for any profitable crime in any country, which is why I see it as such a negative thing overall.
Not in the way you mean it, no. Otherwise industrial-scale bitcoin miners, situated near power plants, wouldn't be able to operate in the open at all, yet they do. Without making any moral judgement one way or the other, China works differently than is generally understood by the West.
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I don't want to downplay criminal use of crypto- its use in cryptolocker-type malware is a real problem, for example.
I do think it is important to recognise that criminals already use existing monetary systems quite well, and that fully-public blockchains have an audit trail that investigators could only dream of compared to plain cash.
