You can still trade it for goods and services

Going back to Bitcoin is unnecessary but possible. You go from Monero to cash, wire transfer, or gift cards through a variety of unlicensed conversion services that advertise themselves all over the Internet.

> but possible. You go from Monero to cash, wire transfer, or gift cards through a variety of unlicensed conversion services that advertise themselves all over the Internet.

Those are probably run by the FBI. It seems like a no brained for the government to try to run such services given the wealth of information they would provide.

Having unexplained assets is not a crime and won't be at least in the US because of the constitution, worst case they could be subject to civil forfeiture. Assuming you did everything else right (full disk encryption, Tor on public wifi/LTE router that you alternate routinely, not using Google, etc) the anonymity of Monero means the government would have a very difficult time tying whatever you bought with the Monero to your actual criminal activity.

Parallel construction: if you do enough crime-adjacent things, the likelihood that you are also engaged in crime makes you interesting to law enforcement.

What is crime adjacent that isn't criminal activity?

Large amounts of money being sent through tumblers is definitely suspicious. Or spending more money than reported income.

Apparently, joining a police deputy gang, falsifying evidence trails and murdering civilians is OK, at least in L.A.:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...

I think pocketing any unlockable crypto-wallets you found along the way would cross the line. You could stick them into civil forfeiture and use the resulting cash to upgrade your department-owned car though.

Most famous right now?

Breonna Taylor (2020) - Louisville, Kentucky: Police officers entered the wrong apartment using a no-knock warrant, which led to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician.

Eurie Stamps Sr. (2011) - Framingham, Massachusetts: Police raided the wrong apartment, and during the operation, an officer's gun "accidentally discharged," killing Eurie Stamps Sr., a 68-year-old grandfather.

As many have mentioned above, civil forfeiture cases for carrying cash are rare, but devastating to people who are originally from countries/cultures that don't trust banks or police.

And of course "swatting" such as https://www.courthousenews.com/texas-woman-sentenced-for-swa...

That's not what was meant with 'crime adjacent'.

Heh, it's a literal meaning of crime adjacent (presuming that the person in the actual target apartment was actually guilty).

I suspect anyone that was an early adopter of crypto is somewhat considered crime adjacent because so much of the early usage was silk road.

For a while after MtGox was hacked I used BTC-e (yes, I lost money in MtGox). It was later discovered(alleged?) that the operators of BTC-e were involved in laundering money for the MtGox hack[0]. I guess my very presence in that case would be considered crime adjacent.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTC-e

So long as you pay capital gains and income taxes, unless you are suggesting tax evasion, which is a crime

Yes assuming you pay taxes. Which funnily enough Zhong did.

> You go from Monero to cash

Then you end up like the guy asking for advice on how to sue his banks for freezing the accounts that he'd been using to run his Monero to UKP gateway.

Spend Monero on physical goods via particl.io?

Mint some pixel art into NFTs and then purchase them with your anonymous filthy lucre wallet(s).

Cash out after selling your subjective value art.

That's deniable, but it's not really anonymous, is it?

This scheme is so obvious that authorities are monitoring such trades and people have been convicted for money laundering by self-trading NFTs this way.

As always, you can definitely get away with this for smaller amounts, but if you go big and/or repeat it for a long time, this has all the potential to come back to you.

on the recent darknet diaries episode the guy bought weed/drugs and sold them wholesale to get it back in to cash