Publicly traded? How does that work for illegal operations? And as far as I'm aware crypto currencies really aren't profitable anymore, ignoring needing an internet connection, leading to tracing the transactions back to this hijacked dam.
The only issue for an illegal operation would be paying dividends, where they need to get their illicit cash to the shareholders.
This is solved by obtaining cryptocurrency and issuing that to shareholders whose record of ownership is tied to a cryptographic tradable share such as using the erc20 standard or erc1404 standard (for programmers that haven't really had an opportunity to see whats going on, these are just classes you can inherit, for design patterns that lead to fungible tradable assets), but obtaining enough cryptocurrency has been a challenge for an organization operating at this scale, as the electronic payment system generally isn't an option even when HSBC is helping, and the physical cash system for crypto system still isn't large enough.
These issues are solved by purchasing computational hardware instead to mine the equivalent amount of cryptocurrency. Mining is not very profitable because there are many people that don't mine for a profit, are the hints obvious enough. It can be at a huge loss as long the haircut on conversion to money is still better than the 20-30% haircut people tolerate in reintegrating illicit money to licit money without the advent of crypto. Regardless, it uses energy and a cartel is in a position to create energy. Either way, mining is extremely profitable for people with low energy costs, the idea of someone mining in their residential unit has been a misnomer for most of the decade.
Mining doesn't need to report your location. This is as simple as using a VPN to reach the mining pool. And if you have enough hardware not to need a mining pool then in many networks your IP address is not reported to the cryptocurrency network, but a VPN can still be a practical privacy measure for this, as you typically don't want cryptocurrency communities to know that you control much of the network.
The energy use itself will be the main giveaway, but only if someone finds an issue with the energy use.
"Mining or not" is still a red herring, its "can cartel obtain enough crypto or not to pay shareholders"
Regardless, in this model the newly minted cryptocurrency is paid out shareholders on record, the record being a share asset minted via the erc20 standard or erc1404 standard. Anybody would be able to buy a cartel share, and it wouldn't necessarily be flag worthy that some cryptocurrency was sent to an address that happened to have a cartel share. Either way it is down to the shareholder to further clean that crypto if they feel like they need to.
If something about this doesn't seem viable I think you also need to understand that not everyone needs fiat currency. These same shareholders don't necessarily ever need to go to a bank, as there are many investment opportunities in the parallel crypto economy, and enough people willing to exchange physical goods for cryptocurrency. The physical economy always being a tiny fraction of the investment economy. Not all shareholders need to worry about banks.
In the meantime, we get a clearer view of the universe of investible assets, and the drug market. Its only been one century of trying to draw a distinction between publicly traded companies as a higher standard of business processes and validation we respect, and marginalizing all others. Before, the East India Companies were the hottest things to trade, and were taking over countries specifically to sell them drugs. So people looking for yield won't draw a distinction, and the technology supports not needing to ask for permission.
The laundering of money using compute and electricity is a very interesting idea that I hadn't thought of before. It's certainly within the cartels power (as quasi-state entities) to obtain cheap/free electricity and start mining. Given the billions and billions in cash just sitting in warehouses, Cartels would presumably be very interested in any way, even with a 50 or more percent haircut, to turn this dirty money into clean money in a legit bank account. While a mining operation won't have enough capacity for probably even 1% of that amount of capital, you would have to imagine that cartel leaders would still probably be interested in such a scheme.
$3.8 billion in ether @ $430 and an average of 3 Ether per block
$3.9 billion in bitcoin @ $11,500 and an average of 6.5 bitcoin per block
(Transaction fees are a significant portion of block revenue now due to the heavy activity on these networks, with Ethereum blocks often having more fees earned than the block reward)
So there is about $8 billion worth of cryptocurrency earned by miners each year, at current exchange rates and activity levels. Cartel just should not exceed 50% of that. Market can tolerate much more and they would be in fierce competition with other miners.
We live in a world where people want the exchange rates to double or increase by an order of magnitude, which means that 8 billion figure becomes 80 billion, it should be clear that we are on the cusp of a market becoming highly attractive to larger incumbent organizations.
