They're largely ERC-20 tokens, which can be swapped for ETH on DEXes. Monero is a whole separate blockchain, and cross-chain swaps are still in their infancy and don't have markets to convert ERC-20 tokens to Monero, or definitely not with any sort of volume.

The ETH will probably eventually be laundered and some of the cleaned coins sent places they could eventually be traded for XMR and eventually cashed out, but there's no way to do that quickly, and this needs to be done quickly.

"still in their infancy" implies they will eventually mature. Non-zero chance we're watching the final implosion of blockchain based cryptocurrency.

I don't think we'll ever see the end of cryptocurrency. Too good of a grift.

I wonder if we will reach a point where "crypto" will revert to not meaning "cryptocurrency" though.

Although FTX was a crypto exchange the crimes committed were not dependent on blockchain technology. FTX is a company and was holding money and assets for its clients. It's somewhat similar to what Bernie Madoff did to his clients, before crypto was relevant.

Blockchain based cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere anytime soon. This will remind people to take self custody of their crypto and not leave it on an exchange.

Just like cash is a crime magnet, so is Crypto at rest, and for the same reason.

If anything, Crypto is easier to track and stop the looting, compared to if someone left a key to a warehouse containing a billion dollars in cash in it with no security cameras, which is what FTX seems to have managed to do.

I don't know if I'd consider this a fair evaluation.

From my observation, the overwhelming majority of failures, collapses, and hacks have had a fairly limited exposure to the Ethereum-style/Solidity-based networks. This even includes the exchange collapses like FTX.

By and large Monero, Litecoin, Bitcoin, Algorand, Cardano, and the other networks that are reasonably isolated from the ETH/Solidity space have been largely unaffected by the majority of the "cataclysm" that the space has seen over the last year or two. I don't see any of these projects closing up shop in the near future and I don't see their communities giving up on them either (maybe with the exception of Bitcoin's refusal to move away from PoW or to introduce more programmability).

Odds are the cryptocurrency space is going to recede for at least a few years once the ash settles but IMHO there are too many projects that have yet to suffer serious thefts (as in actual loss not numbers go up/down) in their communities. Likewise these projects tend to also be the ones with shops that are holding sufficient operating funds in stable assets (i.e. US dollar equivalents & bonds) to continue development for the next 5+ years.

TLDR: The failures, hacks, collapses, etc have had limited effect on a lot of projects outside of the popular/flashy part of the the cryptocurrency space. Those projects still have a more or less assured lease on life for the next half a decade.

no hurry. it's not like he needs the money now

There is some hurry. Miners and nodes could theoretically update and refuse transactions that come from these wallets.

There would have to be enough of them doing this to prevent the transactions from getting through, which is far from guaranteed, but this is of the sort of scale that it could gain the required support.