Crypto is an option here. Seems like a pretty good fit for what the sex workers need.
I still don't understand the "anon" value prop of crypto. We've had anonymous payments for goods (like groceries) for a long time - cash.
Nothing is anonymous without extreme and CONSTANT effort. Any second you don't have perfect opsec, you should assume you are perfectly tracked. This is independent of any laws congress makes, because the policing apparatus does this itself.
The only way to change this is make it illegal to track transactions for anyone, including police, but the second we do that we will see significant sanction busting, money laundering, spam, scams, online casinos, fraudulent businesses etc.
All crime involves money at some point, and if you want to allow the police to fight that you have to allow money to be tracked. You don't get both options.
I think making money untraced is not useful, and instead, we should be fighting for a government that is free enough to allow your entirely tracked transactions to do what you want. Buying some drugs or sex? Whatever, just pay your sales tax. The government knows what you do, that's the modern reality, so build a government that allows you to do things that don't harm others.
As for Tornado Cash, anything that passes (or passed!) through mixers can be tracked and sanctioned as well.
In case of doubt, always assume that the US government has an ability to at least collect all traces of data, and that sooner or later it will make itself an opportunity to, as TC proved even retroactively, seize your assets or make them worthless with the stroke of a pen on a court order. And to make it worse, unlike a wad of cash that you can construct a reasonable parallel way on how you acquired it, you are automatically committing a crime by interacting with a sanctioned entity like TC.
Sex workers have already precarious lives as it is, there is no reason to entice them to even more risks.
the regulators might view that as criminal.
* What the law allows
* What the payment processors allow
Some industries, like sex work and cannabis sales, can be both legal and rejected by payment processors.
The law says they're legal in some places, and local authorities agree. But payment processors still want to protect themselves and their investors, so they decline to do business with such industries.
The moral hazard in this case is not that crypto may be used to avoid regulations.
The hazard is that a handful of private companies serve as de facto regulator and enforcers for all commerce.
You can tell it's a hazard because some people view any alternative payment system as possibly illegal.
You may think crypto should be criminal, but cash should be legal, based on the average age of this forum. But the younger generation has only ever used cash for illegal transactions, and there should be no surprise that governments would prefer a cashless society.
If you believe that crypto, cash, gold, and any other non-banking solution for payment remittance is likely to be viewed as criminal by regulators, then I have to wonder who the regulators are really protecting.
Let's cherrypick one thing and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Also CC fraud that impacts all of us is done using crypto. Silly me.
With crypto you can exchange money with anyone in the world without an intermediary. Visa/Mastercard cannot ban you. This in itself is huge (most people think about this as an abstract problem that has low likelihood until it happens). There are no borders, there is no censorship.
Sex work? Nope. The powers to be decided that's not allowed. Remember when OF wanted to ban all explicit content?
MJ? Legal in a lot of places at state level. But you can only buy it with cash. Think about that for a sec: you're allowed by the local laws to do something buy you cannot do it.
Does giving money to support people/orgs in underdeveloped countries that cannot afford to use the normal banking channels count as use case?
Do you know what happened in Venezuela recently when their currency crashed and how the managed to stay afloat somehow?
Do you understand inflation and how what is currently happening is just another form of taxation? Is inflation and central bank policies doomimg an economy a real use case?
Have you heard about civil asset forfeiture? Abstract af until something like this happens to you. Is that a real use case?