A car salesman goes through all sorts of paperwork and meets with the person they are selling the car too, and they hand the keys over.
This is much more similar to the service where you take a photo of a Key and you get mailed a copy of it for 5$; except it's semi-anonymous with bitcoin.
>This is why conventional financial institutions and services are undesirable for most criminals.
I think reality is in disagreement with you, as counter-intuitive as that may seem.
I suspect most lawyers/regulators would consider changing bitcoin into gift cards is legally like transmitting to cash.
Cars are regulated also, for instance to post a license plate that can be used to identify the owner's name and address, in part because they can be used in crimes.
This isn't _just_ an issue of if the seller is being ethical; it's an issue of whether they're following the law.
As for your car example, I'll leave that to the other comments already rebutting it.
Clearly the most important issue is the factual one... whether there is more than incidental money laundering happening here.
If I had an ad placement business that only placed scammy ads or if I developed software that allowed people to be oppressed, I would also have issues. I would think that enabling criminal behavior is in the same broad category.
As far as cars, there's no issue selling a car. However, if your cars had armor plating and hidden compartment for guns, you have an ethical responsibility to find out if your customers are generally up to no good. If there is still a business to be made from legitimate customers, then maybe there's a way to ensure they're the only ones you do business with.
While I don't necessarily believe that would lead to acts of malice such as confiscation raids, it has already led to bonehead moves such as publishing over the public network the names and addresses of all registered gun owners in an area.
Also, people buy illegal moonshine when legit liquor stores are available. People buy cigarettes sold in the wrong state or from a tribal reservation. Buying a gun from an alley is a possible choice for someone who would otherwise prefer to bypass taxes, paperwork, and bureaucracy--illegal, of course, but not necessarily a prelude to a different crime.
This method of sale represents ~40% of all gun sales in the US. It would be safe to assume that the majority of guns purchased with the intention to commit crime are purchased person-to-person. There's a good breakdown of nationwide person-to-person regulations here[1].
So is operating an unlicensed money transmission business -- in the US, this is likely to be both a state and federal crime -- or a licensed money transmission business without adhering to appropriate anti-money-laundering controls.
> This is a poor analogy.
Seems to be a spot-on analogy.