I'm strongly surprised that is not widely used for money laundering yet.
It seems perfect for the purpose of storing value and moving it semi-anonymously. Especially since you can just buy a bunch of very generic hardware with stolen money and mine pure money.
I'm hoping underground will adopt bitcoins widely before I'll be forced to sell the ones I own.
Maybe there has to be generation change for that, but luckily gangster generations are shorter than average ones.
Not enough coins. Money laundering is billions and billions of dollars. How does one anonymously move 1 billion dollars, without suspicion? Any large purchase or sale sticks out like a sore thumb.
Number of coins is pretty irrelevant (except for UX purposes, I guess). What matters is what's the total worth of the Bitcoin coins. Until all Bitcoins are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with thousands of dollars per Bitcoin (at which point everyone will be using "micro-coins" for daily transactions), they won't be able to do that.
I'm not sure whether it's that easy to break even on mining equipment and electricity any more, I think it was getting tight for a lot of folks. Unsure though.
As for money laundering - bitcoin laundry services do exist, I'm not sure how much money you could put through the exchanges without disturbing the economy significantly, but likely quite a bit.
It seems perfect for the purpose of storing value and moving it semi-anonymously. Especially since you can just buy a bunch of very generic hardware with stolen money and mine pure money.
I'm hoping underground will adopt bitcoins widely before I'll be forced to sell the ones I own.
Maybe there has to be generation change for that, but luckily gangster generations are shorter than average ones.