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Very suspiciously, almost like someone working with preventing money laundering noticed and sent them a letter reminding them about 18 U.S. Code §1956, which m

Very suspiciously, almost like someone working with preventing money laundering noticed and sent them a letter reminding them about 18 U.S. Code §1956, which makes it a crime to assist in obfuscating the origin of proceeds from crime. If you know about anyone using Monero for that purpose, you can't use Monero, since obfuscating the origin of transactions is something you do as a condition of participating in Monero (either as a miner or through paying transaction fees).

ifwinterco 11mo ago
This is all US (and Western Europe) centric perspective. Last time I was in HK you could cash out basically any kind of crypto to cash easily, no questions asked. There will always be somewhere like that in the world
- datadrivenangel 11mo ago
  Eventually interpol does their thing and most people stop participating in distributed organized crime when their plausible deniability loses plausibility. And if you have to go to north korea to cash out, then the convenience is much lower.
  - ifwinterco 11mo ago
    Yeah, I can see both sides of this argument. We're certainly already in a situation where Monero in particular is very much persona non grata in a lot of countries and the only way to cash it out to fiat is P2P (which is risky). Having said that, if you are a crypto proponent, you would argue that cashing out to fiat will become less and less necessary as time goes on and simply swapping to USDT/USDC and spending that will become easier. The jury is still out on that one
dyauspitr 11mo ago
Isn’t gold just like that? Why aren’t gold sellers beholden to those rules?
- ifwinterco 11mo ago
  Gold and banknotes also have the property of being bearer assets but they're less worrying if you're the authorities because they're physical. You can (and people often do especially with banknotes) do crime and tax evasion with them, but you can't transport them across borders in large quantities easily. Something like monero has the potential to be almost as fast and convenient as a fiat bank transfer but able to be done in any size and be untraceable - that's a combination that doesn't win you many friends in western governments

ifwinterco 11mo ago

This is all US (and Western Europe) centric perspective. Last time I was in HK you could cash out basically any kind of crypto to cash easily, no questions asked. There will always be somewhere like that in the world

datadrivenangel 11mo ago
Eventually interpol does their thing and most people stop participating in distributed organized crime when their plausible deniability loses plausibility. And if you have to go to north korea to cash out, then the convenience is much lower.
- ifwinterco 11mo ago
  Yeah, I can see both sides of this argument. We're certainly already in a situation where Monero in particular is very much persona non grata in a lot of countries and the only way to cash it out to fiat is P2P (which is risky). Having said that, if you are a crypto proponent, you would argue that cashing out to fiat will become less and less necessary as time goes on and simply swapping to USDT/USDC and spending that will become easier. The jury is still out on that one

dyauspitr 11mo ago

Isn’t gold just like that? Why aren’t gold sellers beholden to those rules?

ifwinterco 11mo ago
Gold and banknotes also have the property of being bearer assets but they're less worrying if you're the authorities because they're physical. You can (and people often do especially with banknotes) do crime and tax evasion with them, but you can't transport them across borders in large quantities easily. Something like monero has the potential to be almost as fast and convenient as a fiat bank transfer but able to be done in any size and be untraceable - that's a combination that doesn't win you many friends in western governments