Just Bitcoin is currently doing roughly 250,000 transactions per day, and they will have to somewhat manually go through all of them to check for 'illicit activities' and that all of them are somehow linked to a real-world identity of someone. Right?
Reminds me of the guy who claimed to have a trading bot set up to trade constantly all day long with a target of zero profit, just so he could send thousands upon thousands of meaningless trades to the IRS and force someone to waste their time going through it all.Yup, I had read about it, too! Reference, for anyone interested.. (not sure if real, though):
This seems like the only cleartext source for this - I had seen it as a screenshot elsewhere. https://boards.4channel.org/biz/thread/47561034/i-have-a-bot-running-247-buying-and-selling-for-0
Also I don't get how they want to handle Monero, since the transactions aren't public. Will they just ban it? Many open questions.
I imagine they are approaching this the same way the approach most of their mass surveillance programs. Mass surveillance isn't used to prevent crimes, terrorism, etc. Mass surveillance is used to control the general population. Far more people use Bitcoin than use Monero, so it becomes the prime target for mass surveillance.