Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enforcement's secret weapon

Re:Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enfor... by vintermann on Thursday November 13, 2025 @02:13AM (#45911717)

Very suspiciously, almost like someone working with preventing money laundering noticed and sent them a letter reminding them about 18 U.S. Code §1956, which makes it a crime to assist in obfuscating the origin of proceeds from crime.

If you know about anyone using Monero for that purpose, you can't use Monero, since obfuscating the origin of transactions is something you do as a condition of participating in Monero (either as a miner or through paying transaction fees).

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Re:Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enfor... by ifwinterco on Thursday November 13, 2025 @02:51AM (#45911991)

This is all US (and Western Europe) centric perspective. Last time I was in HK you could cash out basically any kind of crypto to cash easily, no questions asked. There will always be somewhere like that in the world

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Re:Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enfor... by datadrivenangel on Thursday November 13, 2025 @10:00AM (#45915676)

Eventually interpol does their thing and most people stop participating in distributed organized crime when their plausible deniability loses plausibility.

And if you have to go to north korea to cash out, then the convenience is much lower.

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Re:Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enfor... by ifwinterco on Thursday November 13, 2025 @03:33PM (#45920154)

Yeah, I can see both sides of this argument. We're certainly already in a situation where Monero in particular is very much persona non grata in a lot of countries and the only way to cash it out to fiat is P2P (which is risky).

Having said that, if you are a crypto proponent, you would argue that cashing out to fiat will become less and less necessary as time goes on and simply swapping to USDT/USDC and spending that will become easier. The jury is still out on that one

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Re:Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enfor... by dyauspitr on Thursday November 13, 2025 @01:05PM (#45918264)

Isn’t gold just like that? Why aren’t gold sellers beholden to those rules?

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Re:Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enfor... by ifwinterco on Thursday November 13, 2025 @03:43PM (#45920267)

Gold and banknotes also have the property of being bearer assets but they're less worrying if you're the authorities because they're physical.

You can (and people often do especially with banknotes) do crime and tax evasion with them, but you can't transport them across borders in large quantities easily.

Something like monero has the potential to be almost as fast and convenient as a fiat bank transfer but able to be done in any size and be untraceable - that's a combination that doesn't win you many friends in western governments

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