Seems like drug lords are learning to launder their money properly again, in a secure manner.
Enough
brainlaundering about so-called “money laundering”. Anyway, using
anonymous digital currency is not “money laundering” at all!
If you are a drug dealer, the whole point of “money laundering” is not merely to
conceal the source of funds, but rather, to
fake the source of funds so that you can file your taxes (unlike Al Capone), have money in the bank, and buy a Lambo without getting in trouble.
Bitcoin mixers, CoinJoin, onion-routed Lightning, and of course, XMR are all almost approximately useless for that!
If you have truly
anonymous digital currency, and you cannot document the source of funds, that is pretty much equivalent to having a big ol’ duffel bag full of cash that you just “found”, um,
somewhere.
That may or may not be acceptable to you, if you don’t actually do anything illegal. I myself love cash. To sane people, there is nothing wrong with having a bag of cash; indeed, perfectly law-abiding old folks who wisely distrusted banks used to keep their life savings “under the mattress” (figuratively—I hope not literally).
But this world is not sane. To the “AML” tyrants,
untraceable funds are
ipso facto “guilty till proven innocent”. And for a drug dealer, using anonymous money without a means to fake a “clean” source of funds is suicidal—because a drug dealer really does have “something to hide”.