I fully agree. I just also think crypto is terrible for that use case. If you’d be caught for using Venmo for drugs they can catch you using crypto. It might be harder, but that whole public immutable ledger means all they have to do is tie accounts to names. Which coincidentally you need to do to cash out or cash in.
Which coincidentally you need to do to cash out or cash in.
Yes, and no. You do need to cash in at some point, but you don’t have to do it thru a public exchange. People do sell physical wallets for hard cash. And even if you do use an exchange, when I last looked into crypto the common currency for drugs (monero) was obtainable on exchanges that didn’t have KYC rules. Outside of exchanges, you can also transmit currency directly to other parties, and once you use tumblers and other anonymous platforms, tracking becomes extremely difficult. It’s not impossible, but it becomes troublesome enough that unless you’re a big fish/crime lord/whatever, the FBI/interpol/whoever isn’t going to be bothered wasting resources.
Public immutable ledger as a means of tracing is not an issue XMR has because it’s all anonymous.
But even if LEOs wanted to tie all that to names then they’d have to use either bank records (easily avoided - don’t buy anything from a bank or licensed exchange and not P2P with bank cards or anything else tied to them i.e. use PayPal under a fake name if you were grandfathered in before all the KYC shit) or they’d have to tie it to shipment addresses for stuff off DNMs which they could, if they bust a vendor, but it doesn’t mean jack shit in a court of law - Who ordered a kg of amph to my household? Lord only knows.
I fully agree. I just also think crypto is terrible for that use case. If you’d be caught for using Venmo for drugs they can catch you using crypto. It might be harder, but that whole public immutable ledger means all they have to do is tie accounts to names. Which coincidentally you need to do to cash out or cash in.
Yes, and no. You do need to cash in at some point, but you don’t have to do it thru a public exchange. People do sell physical wallets for hard cash. And even if you do use an exchange, when I last looked into crypto the common currency for drugs (monero) was obtainable on exchanges that didn’t have KYC rules. Outside of exchanges, you can also transmit currency directly to other parties, and once you use tumblers and other anonymous platforms, tracking becomes extremely difficult. It’s not impossible, but it becomes troublesome enough that unless you’re a big fish/crime lord/whatever, the FBI/interpol/whoever isn’t going to be bothered wasting resources.
Public immutable ledger as a means of tracing is not an issue XMR has because it’s all anonymous.
But even if LEOs wanted to tie all that to names then they’d have to use either bank records (easily avoided - don’t buy anything from a bank or licensed exchange and not P2P with bank cards or anything else tied to them i.e. use PayPal under a fake name if you were grandfathered in before all the KYC shit) or they’d have to tie it to shipment addresses for stuff off DNMs which they could, if they bust a vendor, but it doesn’t mean jack shit in a court of law - Who ordered a kg of amph to my household? Lord only knows.