> Who are you going to arrest?
Every on- and off-ramp provider. EU legislation has basically created a database of real person to wallet mappings (for some subset of wallets). You can't take money from a wallet if you don't know who it belongs to (if you're an exchange anyways). The checks are a bit soft (ie. self attestation and stuff), but the public ledger part of crypto makes tracking far-far easier than with traditional banks.
The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.
> The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.
I agree with you on targeting the on- and off-ramps. But I think you got your use cases wrong.
Crypto has two major use cases these days:
- speculation (aka gambling)
- ransomware payments
Buying drugs is pretty far down the list. And so are pretty much all purchases of normal goods and services.
> Every on- and off-ramp provider.
This is essentially the purpose of localmonero and similar offerings. Trading cash for Monero in a p2p manner is going to be extraordinarily difficult to halt.
The transaction is traced and and eventualy it goes to someone with a real bank accont and the tainted money is refused.
Assuming you mean the cash itself, tracing dollars isn't common with other kinds of small-scale illegal transactions like drugs and firearm sales.
Why do you believe it would suddenly make peer2peer cash to cryptocurrency exchanges unviable?
And if you meant tracing the Monero itself, I suggest you read up on how Monero works—and how it differs from BTC—first.
First, the chain only sees the monero side of the transaction, not the fiat side, of which it's likely that no records exist at all after a short while. It looks identical to a payment for a good or service and it also looks identical to a transfer between two of the same person's wallets.
Second, Monero is still thought to be untraceable. In fact regulated entities are banned from exchanging it in the EU precisely because they can't trace it. (Zcash is also banned under the same law, but is considered technically inferior because not all transactions are private.)
Third, what do you even mean? Do you mean they'll go back to the last time those coins passed through a regulated on-ramp, and prosecute that person? For what? Buying cryptocurrency, then buying a legal product with cryptocurrency, is not illegal, and even if the product was illegal, the government most likely couldn't prove that. Also, the on-ramp was probably in a different jurisdiction. Perhaps for something like "acting as an unlicensed money transmitter" which is a thing they have done against users of cryptocurrencies. If they prosecute that in large quantities, will it fly?
Or do you mean they'll wait until someone takes the crypto to a regulated off-ramp, and then prosecute that person? For what - undeclared income? As far as I know, trading one cryptocurrency for another is a non-taxable currency exchange, at least in some EU countries, so they can't get you for that. And what if they declared it? Again, they might try "acting as an unlicensed money transmitter" of course. What if it never gets to a regulated off-ramp and just circulates peer-to-peer forever? It's more likely tyou think, since remember, regulated off-ramps are strictly banned.