At that point, might as well just stay in Monero to avoid Bitcoin's fees.

Also, there are other ways of coorelating transactions such as tracking BTC -> XMR amounts and soon-thereafter XMR -> BTC amounts (minus fees)

Will monero just be consider a money laundering scheme by the FBI in the future?

Why use monero unless you wanted to hide your transactions? Hiding your transactions is literally illegal in the USA (its called money laundering).

Presumably, the FBI will be able to automatically determine if your BTC came from a Monero exchange.

Hackers use "bisq" which is a decentralized exchange to get around this problem. I am baffled as to how "kingpin money launders" don't do this. I'm not a money launderer and I know this.

As for the fbi consdering monero a "money laundering scheme" in the future. They can outlaw it, I guess, but it's like trying to outlaw video and music piracy, it's hard to do in practice.

> Hackers use "bisq" which is a decentralized exchange to get around this problem.

How does "bisq" provide anonymity to its users? If you're trading BTC, your wallets are still being connected to each other and provably written into the blockchain for all of eternity. Same with Ethereum and other "mainstream" cryptocoins.

If the FBI only cares about "anonymous" coins, like Monero, and ONLY targets those, then all payment processors would "taint" Monero wallets (or any BTC coins which ever touched a Monero-related wallet), and refuse to process them.

Its really not that hard for Monero (or any other minority-coin) to be shut out of the payment processor market and relegated to black-market goods.

Because there are legimitate uses for monero and if you use a service like xmr.to to convert to bitcoin (which mixes the bitcoin on top of that), you are "far enough removed" from the tainted transaction to establish "plausible deniability".

Under the legal theory that mixers are illegal, that sounds very illegal to me.

What is the purpose of mixing the coins? You only help criminals. Gray-market goods (ex: legal pornography) are already solved by the traditional BTC network without anonymity.

Between KYC (Know your Customer) and other such laws in the USA, it is clear to me that anonymizing your transactions is very much frowned upon by the powers that be. If anything, fully transparent and trackable BTC "in the open" has numerous advantages with regards to being a "good citizen".

xmr.to is illegal in the united states so hackers use vpn to get around it.

And there are legitimate reasons to use monero and bitcoin. Sending money to family in countries such as china, iran, and venezuela is one. Another use is legitimiate "adult entertainment" sites where people don't want their sexual fetishes appearing on a credit card or ending up on a blockchain somewhere where the public can see.

> Another use is legitimiate "adult entertainment" sites where people don't want their sexual fetishes appearing on a credit card or ending up on a blockchain somewhere where the public can see.

Have you ever actually purchased adult entertainment on a credit card? They are inconspicuous companies that don't exactly flag what fetish you're into. At worst, you get a cover-company that doesn't actually match up to the website name. I dare say that this is a solved problem in the credit-card world.

Worst case scenario: buy Visa / AmEX gift-cards with cash and use that to fund your porn-stash. If you really have someone watching over your credit-card statements that you're worried about. There are very simple means of avoiding the problem in the traditional credit-card world. If credit-cards are available, then no form of cryptocoin is necessary for any kind of anonymity or protection.

> And there are legitimate reasons to use monero and bitcoin. Sending money to family in countries such as china, iran, and venezuela is one.

No, at best, that's a reason to use BTC. No reason to use Monero yet. And furthermore, using BTC to avoid local currency laws is going to probably put you up to scrutiny by the local authorities.

I don't think the US cares about sending money abroad... but China probably cares if you're avoiding their Yuan -> USD restrictions or creating a secondary market to trade Yuan / USD.

Very soon, converting your BTC to monero will flag your account as high risk.

Then use Bisq. it's a decentralized exchange.

When I read stories about "people getting caught using bitcoin", I am baffled as to why they don't do this.

Maybe, just maybe, the people doing the catching know what they are doing?

Or maybe they don't. Usually, governemnt agencies outsource to private companies to do the tracking. And big companies like chainalysis admit they can't do much about monero or wasabi. Usually, when people get caught it's because the criminal was being stupid rather than the government being smart.