>society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. I'm not sure that's the case, there's definitely many who would disagree,

>society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. I'm not sure that's the case, there's definitely many who would disagree, and even some banks. Complying with these regulations is very expensive and there's not a ton of evidence for how effective they are. Obviously they help sometimes, but the signal to noise ratio is likely very poor and they're not very cost-effective for the amount of overhead involved. In addition to banks, money services businesses must comply with these regulations - people have gone to jail just for selling bitcoin for cash because they didn't do KYC/AML. Of course, no one related to banks goes to jail no matter how bad their compliance is. Relating this to the original article a bit more, it's likely that these things will be abused very badly, with small players going to prison and big players only paying minor fines at worst.