[hashimotonomora]

How does Walmart compare to that regarding purchases with ill-gotten cash?

[georgyo]

Cash is completely fungible because there is no clear trace of money from one person to the next.

If someone steals 100k of cash, there is a very low probability that the serial number of those bills were recorded somewhere. And even if they were, you couldn't easily trace the money though complex systems.

Bitcoin on the other hand is a complete and open ledger. When these large heists that constantly happen, it is trivial to identify the transactions that happen afterwards.

Cash is actually anonymous and Bitcoin is only pseudo-anonymous.

[iszomer]

Which iirc was the basis for "cleanly mined" btc with little to no transaction history on-chain and tumbler/mixer services that attempted to obfuscate it.

[hashimotonomora]

The fact that it’s difficult or expensive to track does not mean it cannot be. Technically it’s possible to force every cash handling business to scan (just like you scan an UPC) each bill.

[ajross]

Walmart (like all large retailers) spends a ton of effort trying to address e.g. laundering efforts with gift cards, actually. Google around for all the press releases about how they partner with the FBI, etc... They absolutely recognize that they're part of the laundering chain (and that this makes them liable to punishments under AML statutes, of course).

[reaperducer]

Walmart (like all large retailers) spends a ton of effort trying to address e.g. laundering efforts with gift cards, actually

For example, you can't buy a gift card in an Apple Store without signing a statement promising that you're not buying the gift card because a stranger online told you to.

Sounds ineffective on the surface, especially to jaded tech-types, but it's enough to give real people in the process of being scammed an opportunity to think about what they're doing.

[anonymousab]

If cash could tell you whether it was illegally acquired then I'm sure many businesses would refuse to accept illegal cash.

[subash_8848]

Thankfully there is no distributed ledger keeping track of every little thing so we don’t have to worry about that.

[temp8964]

Because cash can't be easily identified as stolen, so the problem does not exist.

Just like the electricity cost of bank transaction cannot be easily quantified, so the problem does not exist.

Those problems only exist in Bitcoin. /s

[bena]

No one says that the electricity cost of a bank transaction can't be quantified. They say it's far cheaper than bitcoin.

Because it is.

Bitcoin by its very nature wants to expand to consume every possible unit of energy it can.