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.
A fascinating idea, thanks for sharing