It's not about banning cash or ecash. It's about "purposely" hiding the transactions (Whether legal or illegal) which may run afoul of the money laundering laws. That's why a lawyer and not some "idiot" like you should take a look at the design of DRK and where it is headed and make a determination on whether it does or not. So investments like mine and ours are not screwed if there is a crackdown on something that somebody didn't think of. I think it makes perfect sense to investigate this now before it all gets too far down the road to fix it if something isn't right.
Also, you might look at your own laws...
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/MLR/ Which are just as wild.
I think the issue here is that people don't quite realise how far removed from today's legislative framework a crypto economy will be.
The fiat money system is *centralised*. It is that centralisation which lends itself to regulation.
On the other hand, crypto is *de-centralised*. You cannot legislate for such a decentralised financial activity. You can't ban it, tax it, regular it - nothing. All you can do is regulate the fiat gateways and then only from the perspective of *fiat* money.
I've said before, whether a particular blockchain is transparent or opaque is imaterial. The problem is that there is no regulatory framework in the world which can remotely hope to control cryptos except at the financial and commercial gateways (i.e. you could conceivably ban vendors from advertising their prices in Bitcoin).
I don't think many people quite get their heads round this fact. The anonymity aspect isn't the big deal - that's just providing regular privacy which most people expect from a financial transaction system. It's the economics and technology aspect in general that is revolutionary.
