He doesn't need to get it converted though. There are enough people that don't live in the US and would be happy to get paid in ETH to work on an open source project.
In a way, it seems almost like a feature that he can't just take out and convert the money :)
By that logic US persons can't use Ethereum at all. If you withdraw ETH from Coinbase it is very likely that those coins will have passed through tornado.cash at some point.
This logic obviously doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.
The reality right now is that there are coloured coins by default. We said this would happen back like at least five years ago, and now it is finally here. This is only the start and is essentially the doom of the libertarian case for the blockchain, and once that is out the window I see very little use for it that a normal DB of cryptographic public keys couldn't handle.
