Money laundering means concealing the origins of illegally obtained money. The effort to eradicate it results in terrible laws that necessitates the institutio

Money laundering means concealing the origins of illegally obtained money. The effort to eradicate it results in terrible laws that necessitates the institution of a surveillance state that requires you to report how much money you have and everything you do with it. Those convicted under anti-money-laundering laws are often only found guilty of flouting one of these privacy-violating reporting requirements, rather than actually illegally obtaining money. This is an important distinction. The state does not need to prove you obtained money from an illegal enterprise to convict you under anti-money-laundering laws. So technically, no money laundering needs to be proven to have been committed, for someone to be imprisoned for violating these laws. The scope of such laws is therefore enormous, and goes far beyond the traditional limits of due process. If the concern is people obtaining money from illegal enterprises, then the solution is to shut down those enterprises and convict people for running them. But it's hard to fight real crime, so we sacrifice the basic liberties of the entire population, by making it a crime for anyone to conduct a transaction above a certain size without reporting it to a financial surveillance agency. Naturally, with such an expansive idea of what constitutes crime, and what liberties the government is entitled to restrict to stop it, any technology that enhances privacy will be viewed as dangerous, whether that be encrypted communication, cash, or cryptocurrency. But the problem is not these technologies. The problem is with laws like those created under the umbrella of stopping money laundering, which accept as a priori that people have no right to conceal from others the origins of their money.