If not, what kind of business provides you with hashing equipment from dirty money?
For example, if you go to Ritchie Street in Chennai, India there are plenty of stores that will sell you a top of the line GTX 1080 GPU for cash. No record of the transaction, and no taxes. A lot of stores will probably even accept USD.
You wouldn't be able to launder boatloads of cash this way, but with enough motivation you could do this on a regular basis and offset some cash.
This is a very profound loss of individual freedom, almost as important as losing right to free speech would be, yet strictly no one on the political spectrum seems the least concerned about it.
Be careful equating money with free speech.
Citizens United in the US has had equally-troublesome consequences, based on the premises that corporations are people and money is their speech.
Conflict of interest plays a role here, and that's unfortunately something that has been under constant 'redefinition', especially in the last 20-40 years.
Taxes are 5-18% on top of that.
That part is easy. Other businesses don't know if your money is dirty, the issue is transactional, i.e. buying without a receipt in the tax domain you're in.
So, if you can somehow take 'dirty USD' and buy ASICs anywhere outside of America, it will probably work.
The purpose of Money Laundering is to get money into a bank account that the government will recognize as legit, but 'dirty money' can still be used for whatever reasons for nefarious purposes, a lot of it even from 'good businesses'.
Buying a few ASICS in cash from individual stores will not raise eyebrows like walking into a Ferrari dealership with cash might.
It does seem like a powerful opportunity for nefarious activity, and this may be keeping the price propped up on some level.
Organized crime is big business and they aren't stupid.
Sadly.
Or you can just do a festival and claim that you had a lot more visitors. It's hard to count people after all, and easy to print fake tickets.
So, I simply think that ASICs are not the things used for money laundering, because their output is very constant, and the hashrate is public knowledge, so easy to verify how much money you made.
secondly, when you do buy mining hardware or buy hashrate (cloud mining), most manufacturers and service providers ONLY take bitcoin, so if the money was dirty it still never passed through a reportable system. when you pay for invoices with cryptocurrency there is no billing address or any other information about the buyer. if you funds came from a botnet, a hack or even drugs but stayed in the system, there is no necessity to link your identity to anyone. you can ship your hardware to any address, or straight to a data center, and even if you think that will reveal your identity even the mining proceeds can go to any random address recipient and this is all new money.
instead of trying to reveal the flaws, try imagining it as if you had five million dollars in bitcoin to launder and i2p/TOR and see how you could remain anonymous without messing up your OPSEC on either the blockchain or from your other activities.