Laws are one thing, enforcing them is another.
Just like piracy laws, I bet 0.000001% of the people downloading illegal things actually get jailed or have to pay a very large sum.
Seems like the little guy should be ok. You just want to make sure you don't draw attention to yourself or be the one or two big players on anything questionably legal. For instance you think the government is going to go after someone for not reporting like 5 BTC of mined income? How would they even know you mined it?
Generally speaking this is true, however it is very well possible that law enforcement would want to be aggressive with prosecuting a smaller user for a number of reasons. They could want to send a message to others that they want everyone to follow the law, they could be trying to bring unrelated charges against the person, but can't find enough evidence, so they bring these charges, or it could be any number of other reasons.