How are you going to turn that into actual goods and services though? You'll still need to go through an exchange with KYC and AML and the IRS will still be asking questions.

IRS doesn’t care as long as you pay taxes on the money.

KYC and AML? Just lie that you mined the monero on a now defunct pool. I have a plenty of coins that I genuinely acquired in such manner and haven’t had issues selling them. The bank only cares about hearing a vaguely consistent story, they aren’t cops.

The KYC stuff will only become a problem if you get caught via some other means, because lying to the bank is a crime.

A reminder not to take legal advice from HN.

> IRS doesn’t care as long as you pay taxes on the money.

Lol, you never actually handled the sums the submission is about right? The IRS will definitely ask questions about where the money you spend come from, if you end up on their radar. And if the answer is not satisfactory, they will grill you on it.

Yeah these subthreads always remind me of the Money Laundering subplot in Office Space.

IRS isn’t going to do a deep dive into your purported monero mining activities unless you go out of your way to give them cause to do so.

And even if you did, there’s no way for them to ever prove where your monero came from unless you fucked up during either the hack or the swap to monero.

Even if the IRS suspected that you’re lying to them, how could they prove it?

Again, depends on the amount of money. Sure, there is not gonna be a lot of action from the IRS or any other government entities for $2 million. But when we're talking about $100 million, you start to ruffle some bushes. So they will start to dig where it comes from. If you describe that you got $100 million from mining Monero, you're gonna have to show proof that you have the equipment to actually get that, over the timeframe you're claiming you have mined. If it doesn't match up, they'll dig deeper.

But yeah, I'm not claiming it's impossible to clean stolen ETH. The only claim I did was that the IRS will definitely start asking questions if you go from a declared income around average in the US to a declared income around $100 million from one year to another. To believe that they are just gonna accept "I mined it lol" is a grand delusion.

Yeah, you probably don’t want to cash out $100 million at a time. That is obviously going to draw attention.

But $10 million a year? Perhaps much more if split over a couple of jurisdictions? No problem.

In the end this was about stolen $100 million being worth more than totally legit $2 million. I firmly believe that it would be downright easy to safely cash out $2 million a year from the stolen $100 million.

> To believe that they are just gonna accept "I mined it lol" is a grand delusion.

Unless you keep evidence of your crimes sitting around, at some point they’ll have to.

Assuming you use monero correctly, no amount of forensic analysis will be able to go back from your funds to the original crime.

And besides, the “early miner” story is hardly incredible. Many people have recovered huge sums of money from old hard drives.

> If you describe that you got $100 million from mining Monero, you're gonna have to show proof that you have the equipment to actually get that, over the timeframe you're claiming you have mined

This isn’t really a problem as long as you claim to have started mining early enough, fairly basic hardware would probably suffice.

Or, the criminal could buy goods and services with the monero directly.

The IRS will ask questions of those people, but not the black hat "security researcher".

I want a mansion. How do I buy that with monero?

Land will be harder (though not impossible) to purchase with crypto. next, find a construction company ready to accept payment in crypto. Mansion attained. Perhaps, buy said mansion in Keene, New Hampshire where more crypto users live.

You could fly to Dubai.

Swap to monero, buy an NFT from yourself, convert to fiat, pay taxes. Now your money is clean, taxed, and you have an explanation for where it came from.

No, money laundering is never this easy...I see people on internet forums always suggesting stuff like this; Swap to monero >> NFT (or whatever else) >> clean money...Sounds good in theory but in execution, you'll likely make a mistake along the way and get caught

The mistake has to be in the early stages, it should be impossible to get caught in the “cash out monero” stage.

Even if the government figures out that you have unexplained assets, that isn’t the same as getting caught. Having unexplained assets is generally not a crime, and monero can make it impossible for the government to figure out where you got that money from.