They try to make it so that the inconvenience and risk increases at least linearly with the amount of cash involved.
Linearly? You don't have to go up all that far on a linear scale before you reach 100% chance that you will be caught and receive the maximum punishment allowed by law!
I agree you cannot make risk linear with dollars. What I tried to say is that they try to make inconvenience linear with dollars, so that one shouldn't generalize from the fact that one can take a few 1000 out of the bank in cash and put it in again a few months later without anything happening.
Well, even that's not right, but I do not have time to be more articulate right now.
Tangential, but a subject of some local interest:
Why Bitcoin will fail by Avery Pennarun. "The sky isn't red." Thesis:
I'm not sure I buy these and am not competent to evaluate his claims on 3., but would like others' critique.
L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen by Jason Calacanis. A rather more enthusiastic viewpoint of the project:
The actual text contains many more caveats than the eye-catching selection of points above.