I'm pointing out that anonymous money flows are already effectively illegal, given the KYC/AML laws. At some point, any Funny Money system you create has to interact with the fiat system so that people can actually do stuff like pay their utility bills, and if Funny Money is triggering compliance alarm bells, and at that point, well, read the article.

Something else to point out is that just because a system is unsustainable doesn't mean it will collapse immediately.

Oh alright. I don't see how this invalidates the use cases? The businesses that have payment processor problems aren't illegal, and can easily prove their revenue.

And I do agree that unsustainable systems don't collapse immediately. I've been waiting for Tether to collapse for years. But I don't think cryptocurrencies as a whole are unsustainable (the larger proper exchanges that don't use Tether as their "fiat option" should survive).

In any case real estate is exempt from KYC/AML. That is supposed to be why Chinese people own so much American farmland and so many Canadian houses.

Anonymous money flows aren't illegal. There are those that would like to make them illegal, but all they've managed to institute so far is KYC/AML laws relating to third party payment processors. These laws don't apply to cash or its electronic corollary, cryptocurrency.

Until a law is created that makes unmonitored use of physical and electronic cash illegal, anonymous money flows aren't across-the-board illegal.

One obstacle elitists have in instituting such laws is that enforcement would be costly, involving heavy-handed treatment of large numbers of end-users. Trusted third parties like banks are comparatively easy targets, being much less politically costly to repress.

> And all the U.S. had to do is make drugs illegal, and it would disappear. (Or not.)

Well, yeah. Making drugs illegal makes them disappear. From legal sources. The illegal sources share a similar set of problems as noted. Am I going to get what I paid for? Will I get all of what I paid for? Will there be repercussions? How safe is this?

The drug market being illegal means that for the vast majority of people it's only worth using for fairly inconsequential things. Recreational drugs for the weekend or the equivalent. You might not want to source your cancer drugs there for the same reasons you might not want to source your car or house loan from some random internet entity. Trust. And dealing in an illegal market makes the higher levels of trust very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.

I think the point is that cryptocurrencies will be relegated to second class currencies for as long as they can't or aren't treated with the same trust a fiat currency is.

> > And all the U.S. had to do is make drugs illegal, and it would disappear. (Or not.)

> Well, yeah. Making drugs illegal makes them disappear. From legal sources. The illegal sources share a similar set of problems as noted. Am I going to get what I paid for? Will I get all of what I paid for? Will there be repercussions? How safe is this?

It has been fascinating to me to see how important brand and reputation are in the underground, otherwise struggling-to-be-anynomous markets. But then, even in the chans there were tripcodes.