Hmm, doesn't this work equally well with a wad of $10 and $20 notes? I mean, yes, notes could be clandestinely marked. But aren't bitcoins also traceable after the first transaction?

yes but harder to move 10M in cash around from country to country.

I'm assuming I'm purchasing/selling a lot of MtG/Funko here in this example.

There’s a large industry for cleaning cash which then makes moving a clean 10M or even 10B in clean cash nearly trivial.

10M might not be as noticeable but crypto being nominally in a country on its own isn’t that useful as you still want to be able to spend it at the end of the day.

But do people actually do this? How would you find someone to give you bitcoin for your gold? Are there online markets? Honest Q

Yeah, people do.

Bisq is one place, there's more.

It used to be LocalBitcoins, but it shut down

Sounds like a setup to get robbed tbqh.

My days of contraband in college taught me that the perspective of repeat business kept things quite amicable.

The same way you avoid it doing anything else illegal that involves cash.

Crime is risky, but not pure anarchy. It is still based on trust and rules, just not those written in the law.

There are plenty of regular people who interact with criminals, for example drug dealers, without getting murdered or robbed of all the cash they are carrying.

In Argentina, years ago, you could exchange dollars/euros for pesos on the street and get a far better exchange rate than in a bank. It was obviously aimed at tourists, who didn't get robbed, or the whole enterprise would stop.

True, but this does not happen for large transactions, due to being vulnerable to the $5 wrench attack (1)

For big transactions where something of actual value is exchanged, both parties will want an escrow, and this is where a public exchange comes in.

1 - https://xkcd.com/538/

Except that there is a huge trusted network for this. The world does not revolve around americas and europe. Not everyone has issues cashing out millions of crypto from a bank. This has been especially prevelant with countries that host a lot of Russian immigrants ever since the SWIFT ban, the regulation is extremely lax and there is minimal data shared to western institutions.

I have heard from friends who are in these countries observing transactions that go into the millions of dollars that are being cashed out (not even laundered) like it's just another day. Nobody asks questions, nobody cares either and if you bring it up you will likely lose your job in few months or so.

The moment that crypto is cashed out at a bank, no matter how sketchy, a record is created in a ledger. This completely destroys the so-called anonymity of cryptocurrencies.

No it doesn't. If I go to an escrow company, transfer my ten million in bitcoin to their wallet and they put money into the bank, the only paper trail is the escrow company.

Escrow companies open and close all the time for this very reason. People wash money alllll day long with US real estate for this reason.

Curious though, if escrow company gets subpoenaed and is a legit business, would they not be inclined to reveal the customer they interacted with?

Because they open and close all the time. I've dealt with escrow companies where the owners had opened and closed multiple other escrow companies in a ten year span.

Thanks fro the response, that is really interesting. Is there a paper trail if they were to be investigated?

not every country has a concept of "subpoenaed" especially if it comes from the US veil.

That's fair - I suppose I should have mentioned just the US in my original comment.

this was about the $5 wrench not about the tracing of it and sure you can know the origin but you don't know the final destination.

Well, this escrow could also be some lawyer or notary, Id guess?