You're assuming that the counterparty must be purely transactional. But there are people with big money in this system who have no problem holding vast amount o

You're assuming that the counterparty must be purely transactional. But there are people with big money in this system who have no problem holding vast amount of digital currency. They wouldn't have any problem accepting it as payment for larger investments. Also, imagine you sold one ton of cocaine and now you want to move the money out of the country. You'd instruct your dealers use their local crypto handlers to transfer the money from cash and then wire the digital assets to your crypto wallet. You can now cross any border with that wallet and access it in any country and noone will be able to inspect it if you do it right. And there's already a lot of infrastructure for getting cryptos back to cash - even (and sometimes especially) in poorer countries (think of an ATM, but you can use your crypto wallet to withdraw).