There are several businesses offering the service of taking bitcoins you have and exchanging them for other bitcoins they have for the purpose of obfuscating the the connection between you and wherever you got your bitcoin, for a fee of course.
These businesses are operating openly, my question is if this could be considered money laundering legally in the USA?(feel free to chime in with other nations too though).
I guess you could say it is the equivalent of a service that will exchange paper money you have with some random other paper money to make tracking via serial number harder.
I can see at least two possibilities:
[ol]
[li]They’re maintaining the records legally required of money exchanges. In other words, they’re not obfuscating to the government, just private citizens and companies. [/li][li]They’re relying on the failure of currency regulators to recognize bitcoin as a currency. Here in the US, the last I heard about bitcoin was that only the IRS had ruled it a currency (and taxable as such), but the (rest of?) the treasury department was still on the fence about the issue. [/li][/ol]
Some of those companies are probably also taking immense risks in running afoul of the law. As soon as someone figures out that bitcoin wallet her567345y2465hyy funded a known terrorist cell or some other major federal criminal act.
If that wallet is tied to one of those establishments they will be bean paste.