>I have never understood the appeal of BitCoin as a means of purchasing or selling illegal materials. The entire transaction history is literally encoded in a p

>I have never understood the appeal of BitCoin as a means of purchasing or selling illegal materials. The entire transaction history is literally encoded in a public ledger! In defense of it, there are various sites where you can find a local seller online and go give them cold hard cash and have it sent to a one time wallet. Then go home and then, or at some date in the future, deposit it into a DNM wallet and order whatever you want. From that point you basically have to have a DNM compromised, them to track every single external deposit, track down BilboBaggins17 that you traded cash for, then attempt to get the records for the site you contacted him via as well as try to get him to remember where he met you and when to go attempt to get surveillance then hope either the logs of the site or the surveillance video lead them to you so they can hope to find some way to catch you buying another ounce of shrooms in the future. But yes, it's stupid for things like the above where creeps probably went to an exchange, bought bitcoin with their bank account then transferred it to their wallet then the ring (or directly to the ring). --- Now as a seller, yeah bitcoin is generally just dumb. Sure there are DNM vendors that will convert it to cold hard cash for you (I suspect in the U.S. this is probably being done by some dispensaries, or companies serving dispensaries, to get some of their cash digital) but there is a lot of trust there. Aside from those services, there's no really semi-anonymous way to convert your bitcoin that you obtain from illicit trade into fiat unless you want to get really complicated and shift it from bitcoin to some other crypto, then probably go another step and shift it from that crypto to a third crypto, then from there convert the crypto to fiat. Each stage you are losing transaction fees and probably paying some sort of premium which is going to really start digging into your profit and then you still have to clean the fiat to make it legitimate if you're talking about money you plan to live off of. If you were a small-time seller of something you might fly under the radar by claiming it's various mined and day-traded crypto you've been holding for years but you're probably going to want to pay short term capital gains on it when ou convert fiat and get hammered hard on the taxes which to me would make breaking multiple laws just not worth it. --- What I really want to know is how are the larger ransomware operators converting it to fiat unless they are just using it to buy drugs and/or carded merchandise then sell that for fiat.