[gman83]

I'm very ignorant about Bitcoin, but given El Salvador's big problem with crime, doesn't adopting Bitcoin give the cartels an extremely easy way to launder their money?

[zakember]

Depends on how tech savvy they are.

Bitcoin has a public ledger, so once you know who the owner is of a particular address, you can view all of their past transactions and all the addresses of those transactions, potentially exposing a lot of metadata of their activities

[senectus1]

> Depends on how tech savvy they are.

no it doesn't.

Most drug runners/dealer are not chemical engineers... they just hire guys that know what they're doing.

Same in the crypto space.

The tech isn't inherently evil or criminal, its the people that use it that way that make their activities using it criminal.

[rntksi]

There was an article a while back on Hacker News top list where the blog author explained, in actually very simple steps, how to launder it through services such as Tornado, to disjoin the trail of money. Pretty intelligent piece of work.

[lxgr]

Coin mixers can make this much harder.

[ddtaylor]

I'm pretty sure cartels and gangs are using fiat right now...