> extralegal way to acquire US dollars This is so well put, I am going to take it. I would add that it is also a extralegal & illiquid medium to acquire fiat.

> extralegal way to acquire US dollars This is so well put, I am going to take it. I would add that it is also a extralegal & illiquid medium to acquire fiat. The order books on Bitcoin is thin, its even thinner for Ethereum, even more so for Monero and dogecoin etc. Companies like Coinbase and Binance recognizes this, if they were to sell all the bitcoin in posession it would tank the prices due to illiquidity. Thus their main business model becomes quite similar: - easy onramp of fiat to crypto - difficult offramp from crypto to fiat (when price moves around, you can't even login as servers frequently "go offline") - in Binance's case, they are able to see all the orders in their books and routinely cause short/long position to be margin called - wash trading and other classic unregistered securities manipulation.