> When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.
> I still don't understand how anyone expects "sanctioned lists" to actually work.
Well one of the problems here was the sanctioning of a technology, which AFAIK has never happened previously.
Exchanges have the means to work with regulators, demonstrate good faith, and get themselves removed from any accidental sanctioning. This doesn't exactly apply to small tips akin to BuyMeACoffee.
until someone runs their funds through TornadoCash and dusts your wallet, thus putting it on many sanctioned lists and making it impossible to offloads funds into fiat by legal means.
Bitcoin may not be the best example because it does have a lot of limitation and somewhat failed as a currency and instead turned into a speculative store of value. Block time on Bitcoin is ~10 min. For small purchases, you would probably be fine with 1 confirmation, but a 10 minute wait is terrible UX. There is lighting which is a layer on top of bitcoin which is much faster, but the UX is still a bit clunky.
But in general, I agree that cryptocurrencies could help the problem, but it still carries the compliance and AML risks unless you can outsource that to a 3rd party. What happens if you accept funds from an OFAC or other sanctioned account? Violating AML can come with huge fines and is generally just a massive headache. Cash doesn't have these issues as the evidence is generally impossible to track well. With nearly all cryptocurrencies, the entire ledger is open, so if you accidentally accepted payment from the wrong person, you could get royally screwed at some later time.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was directly adapted from the anecdotes of Harry Nyquist at Bell Labs [1].
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After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that "Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, 'he drew people out, got them thinking'" (p. 135).
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Layering is a step in money laundering where layers of legitimacy are added as money moves around. Structuring is breaking larger transactions into smaller transactions in order to avoid detection. Smurfing is also similar to structuring and honestly I don't understand the difference well enough to explain, but they are often used interchangeably in my experience.