The cult is just a small visible part of it but is a pretty minor aspect of it. BTC would exist without the cultists as long as Russian or Saudi assets need to be transfered without too much oversight.
Of course if your money starts in your "books" before being converted into cryptocurrency then yeah, it's useless. But that's not the use case, it's more about laundering money that's not in the books to begin with (corruption, black market, undeclared sales etc...).
I believe that right now the main deterrent to this scenario is the same reason people don't use cryptocurrencies for legit use cases: it's wildly unstable and you have to convert it to dollars or some other "fiat" to do anything with it.
However, if you want to receive bribes, you just create a new wallet, you receive the bribes in BTC and either change them somehow in dollars or pay a premium to receive some services directly paid in btc (I am sure many people would be happy to receive BTC payment at a 30% discount).
Tax evasion works the same: you receive some payments that you do not declare in BTC. It works exactly the same way people use cash to evade taxes, except that here you don't have to transport luggages full of banknotes.
Another feature of BTC is that it can't be seized. Cash, gold, paintings, they all can be. BTCs are much easier to protect.
You would have to be a total moron to go through all the hoops to use it otherwise. Its kinda like running desktop linux in that way.
For the same reasons it sucks for individuals (volatile, slow, expensive, publicly recorded, difficult to spend and difficult to convert), it sucks for criminals.
So, what, you'd have to be a total moron to go through the hoops of installing Linux as well? Do you think before you comment?
Your 100% figure is wrong given that I, at least, don't match any of your description. You can't go around claiming this kind of nonsense.
Money Laundering tends to be smallish sums deposited over time, resulting in large amounts. You can't wash 100MM in one go.
Terrosist Financing tends to be a very large number of small transactions from multiple global sources in a very short space of time into one account/wallet/location. Like crowd-sourcing, in fact exactly the same as crowd-sourcing.
Less risky than Bitcoin? In the end you have to get it out of the blockchain to be useful, so that's where the pointers from a law-enforcement perspecive are.
It is vastly easier to launder money through regular channels than through a method that by it's definition records every transaction.
Liquidity, though.
As such it only works for entities who don't have vast amounts of capital, eg. people who can't afford an army of tax lawyers to create complex legal tax evasion schemes to pay less tax than the rest of us.
It's more liquid than real estate, which is widely used for money laundering.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/researchers-finds-that-one...
If I worked in your criminal enterprise, I'd could tell your deputies "look at this chump, throwing money away. I'll hire trucks to haul cash and boost our profits by 20%. Help me 'replace' the leader and I'll split those gains with you."
Using Bitcoin to surreptitiously move large quantities of funds is almost always riskier and more expensive than traditional money-laundering techniques.
No. My knowledge comes from anti-money laundering training.
Depending on how fast one needs to move, money laundering fees go from 5% to 30%. Bitcoin is cheaper than that per se. But include the costs of anonymising and cleanly cash out, and you're just adding cost and risk over a wire transfer between fronts.
How do you propose cashing out? Your cronies aren’t going to want their wages in Bitcoin.
> I'm not spending MY 30k, I'm spending YOUR 30k
Practically speaking, if you steal my money it’s now your money. More money is better than less money. In any enterprise, criminal or legitimate, there are systemic incentives for maximising pay-out.
You just made it more appealing and useful, since taxation is theft. Some "criminal" assets are incorrectly classified as criminal, so that's another +1 for Bitcoin.