Cash itself has never been sanctioned though? If the government said “we’re now keeping a database of cash serial numbers that are hereby banned” would everyone need to install the “cash checker” app and scan each bill they receive?
Ethereum isn't being sanctioned. Tornado is. If you transact with Tornado, you're in violation of the law. If you don't, you're not, whether you use Ether or not.
> if the government said “we’re now keeping a database of cash serial numbers that are hereby banned” would everyone need to install the “cash checker” app and scan each bill they receive?
Law enforcement has long used marked bills [1]. The cash isn't "cancelled." If you randomly end up with one, you're fine, in the same way that if you unknowingly end up transacting with a wallet that transacted with a wallet that touched Tornado, you're also probably fine. But if your garage has a box of marked bills, or if your wallet did a big transaction with another wallet that does lots of Tornado activity, you're going to be on law enforcement's radar.
It’s that grind which is fatal for mixers, not unlike Tor exit nodes. Nobody _needs_ to use them except money launderers but they depend on benign traffic for concealment. Even most privacy-minded people are going to hesitate if it taints their ability to make transactions with regulated businesses and the less innocent traffic there is, the more likely it is that using one will attract scrutiny, accelerating that feedback loop since most people don’t want to deal with the risk even if they are totally innocent.
The other level to consider: this mentions DPRK. That means all of the intelligence agencies could be involved and that increases the odds that a mixer is compromised or even run by them as a honeypot. Think about how you can decide whether to trust one, and whether the odds are that you’re signing up for additional privacy invasion like the people who’ve used certain messaging systems or VPNs.
Fixed it for you. There's a tendency, particularly in the USA for people to assume that their law is universal
But crypto cannot be physically inspected at international borders. So for the government, just like wire transfers, they want to know the source and recipient of such funds. If there were a service where you could bring a large amount of cash, obfuscate the origin, then wire it to a bunch of bank accounts under criminal control, that would be the definition of money laundering and also cracked down on.
In this case if Coinbase took some BTC that went through Tornado it would be equivalent to taking a wire transfer from a bank known to be laundering money.
https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/fin105_cmi...
>CBP regularly uses cash sniffing dogs for this purpose.
The dogs are just probable cause generating machines. Had one of these dogs "sniff my asshole" and the agents got a warrant for me to forcibly be taken to the hospital to be "internally examined." (and I was sent the bill by the hospital, both ERs they took me to ~60 miles apart even though I never consented to any of it) The dog never alerted. It's just cover so they can get a warrant whenever they want.
Yeah I'm aware it's illegal to not report on the way out, I'm only saying it seems unlikely criminals doing that are going to get caught.
This database exists, but only banks and police evidence clerks check cash against it.
> Cash itself has never been sanctioned though?
Most countries have a strict limit on the amount of cash you're allowed to carry over the border.
Most people have probably deposited a counterfeit bill and never known it too. Again singular bills are not a problem. They just tell the secret service to keep an eye on that locality and potentially contact businesses that saw the counterfeits come in assuming those businesses didn't flag it themselves.
I recall something like that happening when I was younger. This was long ago, in the pre-Internet days, so unfortunately I haven't been able to find anything about it online; this is only my distant recollection.
There was a theft of a large amount of new bank notes, which hadn't yet entered circulation. The government distributed a list of the ranges of bank notes (since the notes were newly printed, they were in large sequential ranges), and every cashier in the whole country (for instance, in supermarkets) had to check every note they received against that list; since the notes in question hadn't entered circulation yet, they could be treated as if they were counterfeit.
(Since as far as I recall this happened back in the hyperinflation days, and the whole currency has been replaced one or more times since then, there is no longer any need to check against that list.)
There is a huge difference between what can be done with paper money vs numbers on traceable bank account.