[734129837261]

Fun fact: so are Rolex watches and so many other luxury nonsense products with a high price. Wear one on each arm. Travel via airplanes across borders. Sell the watches. Now you have a lot of untraceable cash. Fly back and forth for business purposes seven times in one week. Maybe bring more expensive watches, perhaps that $200,000 USD Patek Philippe is a great way to get that payoff across borders.

Crypto and NFTs are just easier, less risk, less chances of being caught.

Maybe we should talk diamonds. Inherently worthless objects, easy to hide and transport, easy to make part of jewelry, and thus free to transport almost anywhere. Yet that one tiny rock can cost tens of thousands and will allow the corrupt politician to sell for cash money perfectly fine.

[phonescreen_man]

Problem with that though is finding a buyer, let’s say I buy 2 rolexs for 50k, I want to pay off my dealer in Ireland, so I fly there with my two watches.. how do I sell them? Do I just hawk em in a pawn shop, if so would I still get back my 50k?

[eli]

I buy 50k in bitcoin on a US exchange and send it to someone in Ireland and they transfer it to their exchange and cash it out do they get back exactly 50k?

[phonescreen_man]

Sometimes.. sometimes more, sometimes less. The point is there is a crypto exchange they can cash out at, in fact many.. and usually the prices are similar across exchanges. John’s pawn shop doesn’t offer the same price for the Rolex as Patricia’s pawn shop.. anyway.. not really important in the grand scheme of things. Bitcoin bad mmmkay ;)

[eli]

Even if the market price of crypto is magically stable and the exchanges are perfectly in sync, you're still paying the big-ask spread plus the fees to send the crypto itself.

I suspect in most cases Wise or similar would be cheaper and safer.

[latchkey]

> Even if the market price of crypto is magically stable and the exchanges are perfectly in sync, you're still paying the big-ask spread plus the fees to send the crypto itself.

Today, I can buy USDC/USDT in the US, head to any country in SE Asia and sell it locally there, paying less in fees than I would with USD. No KYC on the receiving end.

Wise is a pain the KYC ass and has a lot of limits.

[luma]

See also: the majority of the international trade in art and the use of Freeports. Now you don't even need to move the things around.

[FormerBandmate]

This is literally why pimps wear so much jewelry. Cops take all your cash when they arrest you, they don’t take your jewels

[majewsky]

Diamonds are anything but "inherently worthless". Their exceptional hardness affords them many interesting industrial applications. And trying to write off their asthetic value as "not worth" requires a definition of "worth" that is at the very least extremely unintuitive.