It will be fascinating to see how regulation deals with trying to regulate anonymous cryptocurrency payments. It leads to innocent people suffering from bitcoin's lack of fungibility; this is already happening. I don't know how it will turn out in the end. I believe it is one of the most important issues of our time, given that physical cash seems to be in danger of being phased out and several countries are working on Central Bank Digital Currency in some form.
It is not so simple as "ban Monero". People can swap trustlessly from Monero to BTC. There are 'privacy features' on other chains too, like CoinJoin on bitcoin. Making these activities illegal means there are coins with acceptable history, and tainted coins that have been used for anonymous transactions.
Businesses can use subscriptions to blockchain analysis companies to check if funds are acceptable or tained, then choose to reject payments if necessary. People doing peer-to-peer payments cannot do this, they can't check other peer's coins are tainted. Even if chain analysis software was publicly available, you need access to valuable, sensitive data from exchanges and merchants etc updated on the fly. If "criminals" have access to the chain analysis results then it also helps them to find a way to evade it.
The bitcoin whitepaper is titled 'A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' but it really doesn't work for that.
It is not so simple as "ban Monero". People can swap trustlessly from Monero to BTC. There are 'privacy features' on other chains too, like CoinJoin on bitcoin. Making these activities illegal means there are coins with acceptable history, and tainted coins that have been used for anonymous transactions.
Businesses can use subscriptions to blockchain analysis companies to check if funds are acceptable or tained, then choose to reject payments if necessary. People doing peer-to-peer payments cannot do this, they can't check other peer's coins are tainted. Even if chain analysis software was publicly available, you need access to valuable, sensitive data from exchanges and merchants etc updated on the fly. If "criminals" have access to the chain analysis results then it also helps them to find a way to evade it.
The bitcoin whitepaper is titled 'A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' but it really doesn't work for that.
Interesting example case where an innocent user suffered because they ended up with coins that someone else mixed: https://old.reddit.com/r/blockfi/comments/skxiei/blockfi_hor...