The economics of this are deliciously surreal and in many ways slightly romantic. You have this dingy little shack-like construction out in the "lush green mountains", run by these lunatics of a Mexican persuasion, coordinating billions of dollars of international financial data in a reliable high-trust manner. I encourage everyone to look at the photo in the article and imagine a fat dude in a singlet sleeping on a hammock because that seems to be the vibe of the place.
This is a real case of the truth being stranger than fiction. If I were reading about this sort of thing in a novel in the pre-crypto era it'd be a big building in a city or something. Maybe some dudes in suits. Sealed roads.
Turns out it's going to be closer to an unwashed hermit sitting in their mountain cave spending the days meditating, fighting off snakes and tending to the server racks. Voila, high finance.
But… at the end of the day tech is just tooling. Your crypto money laundering information could well be in a building that once housed a donkey with some sort of keeper checking the blinking lights.
Context:
https://archive.org/details/a-20071-1
Raw data:
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You can do this in a distributed manner. Grid connections are hard to trace if you bribe/threaten the right people.
Tempted to conclude that what they are busting must be the tip of the iceberg
Slow.
Crypto always has a predictable multi year time frame from dismissal to integration for leadership, or change in leadership
Its - bitcoin specifically - is strangely built to co-opt human greed, even I look at the white paper and mining implementation
So all roads lead to its security