Given the fact that coinbase is trying so hard to appease regulators and bureaucrats, I find it very hard to believe they'll ever accept Monero.
You think coinbase LIKES IT that they have to appease regulators and bureaucrats? Or they're doing it because they unfortunately HAVE to do it to stay in business?
All that shit they do has a definite COST to them, i.e. it's expensive to gain a new customer: do you think they are happy when they *have to* deliberately throw away a customer's account for no real reason?
IMHO seems to me that coinbase may internally just LOVE Monero now, precisely because it's gonna give them a natural way to be easily able to STOP DOING all that shit (at least for XMR transactions, if not Bitcoin/Ether going forward).
With Monero, they can say, "Oh, yeah sure guys, we would just love to keep tracking all this stuff for y'all but seems like it just ain't possible with this-here new crypto and its architecture. Sorry 'bout that. So, tell ya what: we'll track it as far as we can for ya, just single deposit source and withdraw address, I guess, with the customer viewkey here that we'll require them to give us, but anything after that? Sorry, you guys gonna be on your own for anything further about any of our customers that you need to investigate. Guess y'all just gotta go back to old fashioned normal police work again and not make us do all your dirty work for ya any more..."
Don't forget that they are fighting in court the blanket request they received for everyone's transaction and personal data. BTW does anyone know how that is going?
Not being able to track does not absolve them of KYC.
If you show up to your bank with a pile of untraceable cash, they still need to do diligence to make sure the source is legitimate. Instead of blockchain analysis, they do things like asking for the source, validating through tax returns, trading records and other documents.
For example, think of all the customers of Coinbase who pull coins out to cold storage. When you pull them back in, it is a simple matter of checking the blockchain to see that they came from Coinbase and are now returning. Diligence is pretty easy. With Monero, isn't it a black box?
And I think optics for tax case are terrible - IRS will say to court "Look, they just made it even easier to hide assets!"
I don't think they will list it for those reasons. If they do, I think it will come with extreme KYC which will discourage it from being a big market.
But I'll be happy if I'm wrong!