OTOH, high quality counterfeits are expensive and there is lots of energy directed at identifying counterfeits and, once identified, dealing with the production and distribution (and even if you are a state actor that thinks your production is safe from outside retaliation, the channels you use to benefit from it in interaction with the outside world are generally not), so a literal unlicensed money printing operation is not as much of a metaphorical license to print money as it might naively seem.
Ironically, large deposits of minerals that contain it are found in China, the US, and Russia.
You can't really take it to a bank. You can buy a cheap banger (car), but forget wandering into a dealership and dropping 25k in cash. (Apart from anything else, they'd be worried the cash was stolen or counterfeit.)
Travelling with it is risky. Flying especially. And in the US there's the danger of confiscation by the police. Everywhere else there's confiscation by the public as well.
You can't buy a house. Certainly no shares or most other assets. Hotels, maybe, depending ion the hotel. Nothing too fancy.
Groceries sure. Day to day expenses, sure. Just no Amazon.
Like I say, cash just doesn't scale well (despite what you see in the movies.)
None of those drawbacks mean it's a bad idea - just that it's not simple and ultimately comes back to fundamental questions of value exchange. I.e. Most of the time it costs fewer resources to exchange things for money on the black market than arranging to have extremely high quality forgeries in the hands of your agents.
Motorcycles. Work at a motorcycle dealership and you will see customers with cash for a 10 to 25k$ motorcycle. Also, in the middle east it is normal to spend cash on even large items. A Saudi millionaire wanting to buy a car with $200,000 of cash is not unusual.
Other countries have their own terms for what they’re doing, and they aren’t the same terms.
The confusing part is that due to the US dollars reach, a LOT of foreign banks are US ‘licensed’ in order to interact with the US banking infrastructure, so there is some degree of it they need to apply in some cases. But it’s still US law only, and they don’t apply it in general.
Aka since 1970 in the US.
That a few close allies cut-n-pasted the terms decades later doesn’t change it.
Sell it to a cartel at a steep discount. They’re experts at dealing with large globs of cash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Hour_2
:)