>The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? TBH I think one of the larger reasons why authorities haven't taken more aggressive action ag

>The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? TBH I think one of the larger reasons why authorities haven't taken more aggressive action against cryptocurrency blockchains is the "prosecution futures" aspect. The capabilities of the system attract illegal use, and truly staying unidentified requires really tight opsec. This gets even harder if you want to be able to pull some value back into traditional currency anywhere in the process. It is effectively a distributed honeypot the authorities don't even have to run themselves.