[chadgpt3]

There was one before Bitcoin called Liberty Reserve. It was a website. You could mail cash to some guy and he'd put it in your account and you could request cash mailed back to you and you could transfer your balance to other people on the website.

It was a centralized operation. The feds seized the server and arrested the guy. For money laundering, obviously. No more Liberty Reserve.

You can't do that with Bitcoin - that's the innovation. It's very censor-resistant.

[AnthonyMouse]

The problem, of course, being that what "Liberty Reserve" was doing should both never have been a crime to begin with and doesn't prevent any real crime by prohibiting it, the same as with Bitcoin.

Suppose you had the Liberty Reserve guy mail you a box with a million dollars in cash, proceeds from your unspecified illegal enterprise. Now you want to go buy a house or a Ferrari or whatever. What are you supposed to tell the IRS when they ask where you got the money? It helps you with that not at all. Meanwhile the things people actually do to provide a manufactured answer that question are unrelated to the ability to send cash over the internet.