It's absurd but increasingly common to see such bad, ignorant metaphors of technologies used by people with en emotional vitriol on a site like HN.
The mafia is a emphatically criminal organization made up of people whose unique and specific purpose is to extort, rob, threaten, kill and steal as their core activities.
Crypto is a bundle of interrelated technologies and cryptographic protocols that can be used for bad, good or neutral purposes by humans with all kinds of agendas. In the case of decentralized cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, nobody's even in specific control and claiming they're evil is like claiming a random algorithm is evil, or that encryption is evil because alongside dissidents and social activists, pedophiles and con men also use it to keep their communication private. Ridiculous.
That's kinda like saying the Mafia could be good if it weren't for all the bad actors.
At some point the Mafia itself becomes bad and then becomes the reason someone joins it -- to be paid handsomely for committing crimes.
That's I think where we're at with crypto.