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Exactly, people who keep honestly earned currency in a bank can probably afford to laugh on the way there—they are used to paying tax, they don’t have to worry about new KYC measures somewhere or theft of their token device invalidating their savings, etc.

They can be made fun of by cryptocurrency holders here on HN, but interacting with the financial system is much less like a warzone for them.

I'm sorry, what? In many, possibly most jurisdictions, and certainly in the United States, there is nothing in the law that specifically stops you from having made a perfectly legal, legitimate fortune by holding bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies and then cashing them out into fiat through the same formal banks that any other investor uses with no worries about dodging KYC as long as they followed reporting requirements.

Unless they're actively evading taxes or laundering money, cryptocurrency holders on HN or elsewhere can interact with many parts of the financial system without any warzone traumas at all. You're blatantly misrepresenting the nature of how it's possible to make money with Bitcoin et al. The majority of it is a legal market and its completely legally possible to hold, gain, sell and cash out successfully.

How is the system supposed to be able to tell whether a cryptocurrency holder engaged in laundering money? I recall reading the evidence is easy to completely erase with a few conversions across coins/exchanges/tumblers. This would never be possible in the traditional financial system—except if you use cash, which in large transactions is considered itself a red flag for that reason.

Again, are you kidding? Aside from what you say about untraceability not being entirely true due to the much smaller overall ecosystem and finance pool of crypto, concealing dirty capital and assets also happens far, far more enormously in normal finance.. In the world of non-crypto banking, literally hundreds of billions of dollars of assets are regularly moved, labeled, washed and rewashed in ways that make it extremely difficult or costly to know about the dirty origins of much of that money, which is invested worldwide in all sorts of seemingly legitimate ways. This extremely common occurrence is positively global and doesn't even always require physical cash. More often than not it's purely electronic. I know that many people on this site hate cryptocurrency at any opportunity, but come on.. At least use better arguments.

> what you say about untraceability not being entirely true

Oh, OK. I have no idea, just true coin anonymity is something I regularly see cryptocurrency advocates brag about on HN. Some imply it's as easy as changing to Monero and back, others point to tumblers, etc.

> literally hundreds of billions of dollars of assets are regularly moved, labeled, washed and rewashed in ways that make it extremely difficult or costly to know about

Costly but possible, if one follows the money and studies the paperwork. Stories about shady manipulations and laundering do hit the news from time to time.