Stolen goods seem like an efficient enough way, and I can't see theft going away even if you eliminate the "elephant in the room" which is drugs (by either decriminalizing them or hypothetically winning the war on drugs)?
Theft doesn’t scale that very well. You try laundering $10 million by selling stolen goods at the pub. It’ll take you a while, and I can guarantee that the police are gonna notice.
Even then you’re just turning your goods into cash. Which is still difficult to spend when buying high value assets like property. At some point if you’re a criminal that wants to spend their cash, and live in a developed country you need to turn your crypto into clean fiat in a bank account, or prove the crypto didn’t come from illicit sources.
If criminals are the only people using cryptocurrencies, it becomes socially trivial to criminalize the possession of software that interacts with cryptocurrencies.
A law is only good if it can be enforced. Technically piracy is illegal and yet pirated content exists and keeps being consumed because there's no way (for now) to control what people run on their computers and even more so when there's a direct financial incentive which could even fund building dedicated hardware if general-purpose computers can no longer do the job.
It's as easy to enforce this law as it is to enforce laws that criminalize possession of bits - for example, child pornography. Which, by the way, get enforced all the time.
The only reason piracy isn't enforced is because it's largely a civil, as opposed to a criminal matter, which constrains the tools available to copyright holders to go after pirates. Criminal investigations, in comparison, are not hamstrung the way that Warner Brothers going after someone downloading The Matrix is.
You significantly overestimate the financial incentives for building special purpose hardware solely for the purpose of participating in a criminal economy. That would be trivial for the police to shut down, because hardware manufacturers have a very conspicuous physical presence.
There's a reason nobody sells 'piracy-solutions-in-a-box'. It's because you need factories to build those, and you can't exactly own a factory in secret.
> There's a reason nobody sells 'piracy-solutions-in-a-box'. It's because you need factories to build those, and you can't exactly own a factory in secret.
Piracy boxes are a thing. There are Android TV set top boxes loaded with all kinds of piracy software being sold at a premium, and they manage to do so without factories.
Similarly, you don’t need a factory to build a Bitcoin wallet if (hypothetically) you can no longer use a general purpose computer for that - a microcontroller and hobbyist-level tooling is enough to build one.
