re: Spinoff: When do you think we will do away with hard/paper currency in the US?

You are assuming that you will always have electricity to run the machines that process the cards. Hurricanes and other acts of nature have a nasty habit of affecting our modern habits.

Digital will never occur until they can control the generation of 1's and 0's. ALL digital is literally a series of 1's and 0's, how it is rendered is the difference.

Look up the Montana Freedmen from the 1990's. Where they broke the law was in moving fake digital transactions through the banking system. Their false digital uses in having bogus credit cards they created, that stores accepted as valid transactions, may have been immoral but not illegal. (credit is not money, the user agreement contract turns it into currency by agreeing to pay in US $'s. The Montana Freedmen issued their own cards without that US $ part).

As far money laundering goes Gift Cards are already where the big action is. Easy to convert cash into a stack of Prepaid credit cards and gift cards. Have one of those Panamanian shell corporations give a person a title so they can carry a suitcase full of gift cards through customs in the name of corporate activity, voila, illegal cash laundered into spendable currency.

Damn, I had no idea BitCoin was at $430.