I could send you $10k worth of Monero today. Literally you. I won't but I could. You'd have it by this afternoon. It'd basically be you posting a public key. Safe, secure, we'd still both have plausible deniability that anything had even happened. There'd be a comment on HN, for whatever that was worth in court.
I have a hard time seeing, logistically, how I would get $10k worth of cash to you. I'd need to organise planes, couriers, figure out your address (there'd be a paper trail from that too). Assuming I was willing to cover the transport costs there'd still be quite a lot of risk at the endpoints of someone walking off with the money, and a massive paper trail/fingerprint across a couple of third parties. Probably issues at customs and it'd be a slow process.
Technically you can argue that this is the same thing, but I don't think it is. The practical differences are big.
> I think that may be more a failure of imagination than a likely failure of the regulatory environment.
Maybe. I'm quietly confident. Go in to detail here. Say, hypothetically, I just bought a house from my mate Morris for $350k and you think I also gave him an off the books $100k in Monero to avoid paying taxes. You're the regulator, what happens next? How do you police this? How do the costs of policing this compare to traditional measures?
I wouldn't think that was feasible with cash, it'd be too obvious I was gathering $100k, the risks of something happening to that cash would be too high & there'd be $100k in cash sitting around for police to find in a raid. But good luck proving that I have a secret 2nd crypto wallet. If I do, which I might not.
I have a hard time seeing, logistically, how I would get $10k worth of cash to you. I'd need to organise planes, couriers, figure out your address (there'd be a paper trail from that too). Assuming I was willing to cover the transport costs there'd still be quite a lot of risk at the endpoints of someone walking off with the money, and a massive paper trail/fingerprint across a couple of third parties. Probably issues at customs and it'd be a slow process.
Technically you can argue that this is the same thing, but I don't think it is. The practical differences are big.
> I think that may be more a failure of imagination than a likely failure of the regulatory environment.
Maybe. I'm quietly confident. Go in to detail here. Say, hypothetically, I just bought a house from my mate Morris for $350k and you think I also gave him an off the books $100k in Monero to avoid paying taxes. You're the regulator, what happens next? How do you police this? How do the costs of policing this compare to traditional measures?
I wouldn't think that was feasible with cash, it'd be too obvious I was gathering $100k, the risks of something happening to that cash would be too high & there'd be $100k in cash sitting around for police to find in a raid. But good luck proving that I have a secret 2nd crypto wallet. If I do, which I might not.