In fairness, if I set up a bank which, by accident or by design, made it exceedingly easy to launder millions in cash relatively quickly, you can bet the DOJ would have a problem with that.
Transporting millions in cash is risky (either you trust the courier with that and risk their life, or you do it yourself and risk yours), and doing so internationally is extremely challenging and/or expensive. By contrast, doing it digitally is quite easy and fast.
It feels a bit disingenuous to insist the two are the same.
Public companies tend not to get punished because it ultimately punishes the shareholders. Chickenshit club book talks about all the reasons why the DOJ doesn't go after the big public companies with criminal prosecution.
Along with Civil Asset forfeiture mentioned by others, there are also:
* Know Your Customer laws,
* mandatory Suspicious Action Reports of all transactions over a certain value,
* anti-Smurfing or anti-Structuring laws that against structuring deposits to be under the threshold of SAR reports,
* a whole host of foreign transaction laws
* and plenty more...
So yes, prosecution of use of cash is very alive and healthy with people getting prosecuted for all of these crimes related to use of cash. And this is before any prosecutions that establish direct use for terrorism or drug cartels.
I've used cash for over 20 years to buy things, I have not been prosecuted for it. Neither have any family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc that I know. Note that I said "everyone", since the comment I replied to basically said everyone who used some shitcoin service would be open to prosecution.
Wait, isn't that basically the basis for civil forfeiture? "We don't know why you would have this much cash, so prove it isn't related to drugs/laundering"?
There's no trail (or not an easy trail of evidence) to know for sure where cash payments went from and to, whereas blockchain provides that trail - you just need to figure out who owns or has claimed to own the wallet etc; having that as a resource would make conviction much easier, and magnitudes easier to find people involved. I don't know how pleading ignorance would hold up depending on the role you played in any illegal activities.
Isn't traceability a positive aspect for cryptocurrency in this case? You've got nothing to worry about if you're an honest investor, and frankly, this is one of the benefits of a pseudoanonymous crypto.
You definitely see them prosecuting people who accept cash from cartels and terrorist cells or engineering financial entities explicitly to do so. Tether looks a whole whole lot like one of those.
Transporting millions in cash is risky (either you trust the courier with that and risk their life, or you do it yourself and risk yours), and doing so internationally is extremely challenging and/or expensive. By contrast, doing it digitally is quite easy and fast.
It feels a bit disingenuous to insist the two are the same.