> While it is no secret that this service was used by criminals (like DPRK) to launder their money, there are some legitimate use cases for such a product as we

> While it is no secret that this service was used by criminals (like DPRK) to launder their money, there are some legitimate use cases for such a product as well. It's funny how digital asset enthusiasts always conflate money laundering and private exchange of cash. There are fixed legal limits of cash transfers. When crossing borders you literally have to declare cash exceeding certain amounts. In the US the police can even confiscate suspicious amounts of cash. When they talk about private cash transactions as an equivalent of crypto money laundering, they pretend they're talking about putting a $20 bill in a Birthday gift card, buying a copy of Sports Illustrated at the bodega or tipping the neighbor's kid for mowing your lawn. These aren't scenarios where cryptocurrencies are currently useful and as long as cryptocurrencies behave more like a speculative asset (which doesn't seem to change any time soon) these will still be better served by cash. What cryptocurrencies instead currently supplant are transactions that would otherwise be handled by bank transfers, credit card payments or online payment processors who have to follow very strict auditing requirements to explicitly prevent money laundering. If you provide a slower, more expensive, less widely used option whose main advantage is "privacy from government surveillance", it will attract exactly the kind of transactions that people don't want to do on systems designed to prevent money laundering. In other words: money laundering. If you want digital cash that's hard to trace, scammers have long since found a tool for that: gift cards.