As a local drug kingpin you can employ somebody to spend all day trading bitcoin to strangers for cash at the mall foodcourt and avoid the banking system entirely.

Instead of just having the cash in the first place?

The bitcoin allows you to participate in E-commerce.

cash doesn't scale, it becomes difficult to store, hard to move, and is easily discovered.

That also sounds like Bitcoin

I'll carry two BTC, you carry $120k USD, we'll see who gets to the finish line first!

Is the finish line spending any of this money on a car? Or a house?

Sure!

House: https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/first-tesla-now-rent-...

Car: https://www.tesla.com/support/bitcoin

But with cash you'd have an inflation tax on everything you earn.

And depending on where you live you wouldn't be able to make big purchases in cash (in France I think the maximum cash transaction allowed is about 3000€).

BTC or cash you would have to launder your money to make it look like legit and be able to buy a house etc

Of course the other problem of BTC is that transactions are stored forever (as long as the BTC network operates) so it might bite you decades later.

> But with cash you'd have an inflation tax on everything you earn.

This has to be the worst reason a drug dealer would avoid dealing in cash ever. Inflation is literally 2% per annum. Drug dealers pay 20%-50% to launder their money. C'mon now.

With BTC you would need to pay transaction fees, and in practice, anonymization fees (e.g. for mixing services, tunneling through a private cryptocurrency) for many transactions. These would amount to far more than inflation for USD, EUR, etc.

Switching to monero would incur you, what? 0.1% fee total even when you add all the transaction fees? Doesn't seem like much of a problem.

The problem isn't just the transaction fees but markups by exchanges (BTC -> XMR, XMR -> BTC) that each take a cut. Last time I calculated this, even after shopping around for cheaper exchanges it was well over 1% in total fees and probably something closer to 3%, but I'll have to double-check.

I'm beginner, but if both ExchangeA and ExchangeB is investigated by law enforcement, ExA knows sent address and ExB knows received address. So it's not perfect unless you add intermediate private XMR wallet between A and B, isn't it?

Why would you buy BTC at all in this scenario? If you are going to an exchange you can just buy fiat-XMR and XMR-fiat.

Deposit money to Binance, covert to XMR, withdraw XMR is well under 0.1% total in fees.

I wouldn't. As you mentioned, I would just find an exchange that supports fiat <-> XMR. I'm just responding to the top-level comment that specifically referred to Bitcoin as the preferred currency for these transactions.

Sure, at small scale, not much of a problem. But start moving $$millions, and you'll simultaneously move the market, paying more as you buy and receiving less as you sell.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

> But with cash you'd have an inflation tax on everything you earn.

Yes, there are risks involved in doing criminal business, inflation is not one of them

Why not someone else's bank...?

That thinking is quite shallow.

Sure so now you’ve paid it to their account what happens? They will be investigated for unknown wealth. At some point they’ll need to move that money to the drug dealer - either by cash or another bank transfer.

You show up at their house and escort them to the bank where they withdraw the money and give it to you?