You used to be able to convert to monero and then back into bitcoin to make it completely untraceable. Suspiciously all exchanges stopped offering monero in a coordinated way at the same time.
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).
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
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.
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
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
In the grey areas of business, it is not uncommon to be allowed to keep doing gray area shit if and only if you're willing to play ball with authorities. Once you start making their work impossible, they'll bring down the hammer.
Everyone should just assume that if they're trying to hide themselves via some service, that said business will provide your information/data to the authorities, if asked to.
