Partially agree with that. While I did mine some ETH back then, it was just a hassle with heat and power use and ended up just buying. I mean I had the PC and GPU anyway so the cost for the GPU was essentially 0. But still if I had mined for another year or 2 this would easily be worth 100k right now.
Oh, and I still have that 290x running...sadly I missed the train for updating...ain't paying $500 for merely doubling performance after 8 years or so.
if i had continued mining during winter 2012 (i have electric heating so it would have been money i would have spent anyways) i would be driving a ferrari and posting pictures in the OT/discussion crypto millionaire thread.
at least monero is open-source and decentralized. You can't shut it down. People all over the world are running nodes and the US goverment can't touch some Aussie or Russian or Japanese guy running monero node. They can make a law to prohibit running a node and forbid it on US exchanges but really that doesn't stop anyone from buying it on a DEX / or no KYC CEX. And if you use l2p they won't even know you are running a node.
i dont doubt that people around the world would continue to run the nodes, but i am saying that if customers in the us/can and eu cant easily get money out of a local exchange to cover the drugs/guns/contraband they just delivered as payment then those darkweb suppliers arent going to bother with crypto. if there isnt enough users then confidence in any coin drops and no one will invest/speculate.
money laundering is one of the biggest issues in organized crime, there is no point in doing the crime if you cant find a way to spend the loot on normal stuff without worrying about the irs investigating. without clean money you cant buy anything significant: house, car, major durable goods; because nobody is going to accept a house payment in cash. i knew a guy in college who did middleman brokering for mj. the dealer he connected to customers had tons of money but could only buy stuff under $200 at any given time. the second they try to put significan money without a clean paper trail in a bank, the criminal is risking getting caught.
exchanges are getting busted by govt law enforcement for crypto pooling to hide the origin of coins. no traditional finance type person is going to run a crypto exchange in the us with that much heat given the rampant asset seizure/forfeiture.