I don't really get the article's point on bitcoin and AML/CTF. The legislation works by requiring financial institutions to bind real-world identities to accoun

I don't really get the article's point on bitcoin and AML/CTF. The legislation works by requiring financial institutions to bind real-world identities to accounts, at the point of registration. Many bitcoin exchanges comply with this in the same way banks do: they do the required ID check if you want to set up an account (or when you want to transact in non-trivial volumes). Most of the reporting under AML/CTF laws is automated, as there are a bunch of 'automatically report' rules like: - Any transaction over $10,000 - Any transfer involving a foreign bank account, regardless of the amount The manual reports are much rarer, and rely more on things like bank teller judgment. Essentially they'll report 'structured' transactions that seem designed to avoid triggering the 'automatic reporting' rules (e.g. someone depositing $9,999 5 days in a row). Of course there are tonnes of holes in AML/CTF, even for conventional financial systems. For instance, if you want to transfer your money to a tax haven, you first route the money through some non-suspicious country. Even if that country has a data sharing agreement with the US, it's much harder for investigators to follow the trail. It's hard enough to get two bureaucrats from different departments to co-operate/co-ordinate. It's orders of magnitude harder to achieve this across borders. My point is this: yes bitcoin allows you to use a tumbling service, or coin join, or whatever to sever the link between your transactions and your identity. But this is also easy enough to do with conventional financial systems. I don't think bitcoin has some special property here that presents any kind of new problem for AML/CTF. Perhaps the more relevant issue, which has nothing to do with bitcoin, is that there are fairly trivial ways to avoid detection via AML/CTF laws, regardless of your chosen medium of exchange. So the laws tend only to catch the less sophisticated money launders/tax cheats. Bitcoin doesn't pose any new questions, but the existing ones are still worth answering: is the additional regulatory impost on financial institutions worth the compliance gains from AML/CTF reporting? If the answer is 'no', then perhaps we should just do away with them entirely.