First of all, cash is not "ideally designed for money laundering". Second of all, Taler improves upon cash for combatting money laundering. Money laundering by

First of all, cash is not "ideally designed for money laundering". Second of all, Taler improves upon cash for combatting money laundering. Money laundering by its very nature creates a dishonest paper trail to hide the real source. When laundering cash, the paper trail and the cash are separate, and because the serial numbers of bills are rarely recorded, there is no proof that the paperwork presented to regulators explaining the cash income actually resulted in said cash income. For example, imagine a cash-rich business being audited by the IRS. The business shows daily bank deposits of $10,000 per day, with approximately 100 daily receipts for 100 daily transactions worth about $100 each. The money launderers were actually trying to hide large single transfers of $300,000 monthly that were being buffered into daily deposits, but because the dishonest paperwork shows 3,000 separate transactions, that's what's "real" until proven otherwise. With Taler, the cash transfer and the contract are cryptographically bound. Which means that money launderers can't just draw up some fake paperwork after one large transaction, they need to make 3,000 real transactions actually happen, from real Taler wallets, which themselves must appear reputable since all Taler wallets are independently auditable (what good is having a money laundering business to hide your dishonest Taler wallets if your dishonest Taler wallets are in danger of being randomly audited themselves at some other point in time?) This drastically increases the cost of establishing an apparently honest paper trail, which in turn makes money laundering using Taler less appealing.