Let's be honest anyways, the cryptocurrency "industry" as we know it is less than 4 years old, and in 4 years it may be gone. Exchanges like coinbase and so-called defi innovators like A16Z need this legally-dubious signalling or they'll risk never having another leader corrupt enough to sanction their behavior.
The weird thing here is that a cashier would test it!?
It wasn't confusing to me, but evidently the way it was worded confused others.
But unless you can point to any other group with actual power and money who was pushing for it, the most obvious answer is that the main funders of the crypto PACs were at least ok with it. There's no way they couldn't have subtly squashed this pardon with Trump if it was just the Libertarians asking for it given that they seem to have gotten him to commit to do literally everything else they want.
There is no commercial product capable of testing cash for drugs. Anyone claiming to sell such a product is lying.
There is a wipe, like a baby wipe, that is sold as a "cocaine detection wipe". It is a lie.
It uses a dumbed down version of a spot test that is very good at detecting cocaine, but it also reacts with many other substances that are not cocaine.
The test was dumbed down because the substances needed to make it more accurate are much more dangerous than the cobalt thiocyanate (which is STILL not good for you) used in the "safe" tests.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of substances that will cause a cocaine detection test to return a positive reaction. One of them is Benadryl. Benadryl causes such a strong and vibrant reaction that you would think the entire object being tested was made of pure cocaine.
If you keep a single packet containing one Benadryl pill in your bag and you use it and while taking it a handful of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) molecules get transferred from your fingers to the outside of the packet, and then you toss the packet into your bag and they get transferred from the packet to the interior of your bag, to a wallet in your bag, to the cash itself, testing the cash in that wallet with a cocaine field test will produce a stronger positive result than if you had rolled up a bill and snorted a line immediately prior to the test and there was still powdered cocaine on the bill.
This is not a joke or exaggeration. If you touch a single Benadryl pill with the tip of your index finger, then poke the tip of your finger to a sheet of paper, then you put that sheet of paper in a printer and a rubber roller in the paper-handling mechanism rolls over the spot you touched, every single sheet of paper printed by that printer for MONTHS will test positively for cocaine. (using the tests that don't require training, PPE, and expensive lab equipment).
Did your totally real and not bullshit cash have drugs on them, or Benadryl, or ANY substance with the ring of carbon atoms that the test detects?
"But this study found 80% of bills had dru..."
Buddy 100% of all bills that have been used just once have actual literal shit, feces, dookie, poop, (and staph!) on them.
There is poop in your wallet right now.
"Some cash has cocaine on it" has no logical relationship to "all cryptocurreny use is illegitimate".
If they wanted to refute the original claim and say that cryptocurrency has legitimate uses or if they wanted to make a separate point to say that cash is similarly only useful to criminals, they failed.
I thought the "legal tender" argument only worked in regards to debts to the government, though IANAL.
Maybe the pen thing was only to test if the bills were fraudulent, and then the machine in the back of the store could also do drug tests? Or maybe it was all a lie and they were just bullshitting me.
The benadryl thing was a good read
Good explanation: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/04/18/what-is-...
Another distinction here is that a store is offering a contract. It isn't a debt until the contracted is accepted.