13 ms·

How Dirty Money Disappears into the Black Hole of Cryptocurrency

101 points by chollida1 8y ago

olivermarks 8y ago
Given the incredible amounts of dirty money that goes into global property/real estate there is an element of chutzpah about dinging crypto https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1906500.McMafia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1906500.McMafia
- drawkbox 8y ago
  When they looked into high-end real-estate in 2016, up to 30% of all deals were suspicious of being money laundering. [1] They looked just primarily at New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets. > The rules cover properties purchased for more than $3 million in Manhattan, properties over $1 million in the southern Florida locations, over $2 million in the California locations and more than $3 million in the Hawaii locations. > Treasury said that among the transactions covered by the rules over the past year "about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report." It makes you wonder how much the real estate market is inflated due to money laundering and foreign funds flowing in for washing or investments, keeping real customers out of the market. Fact is money laundering is a problem in real-estate, art, crypto, political campaigns [2] (with Citizens United) and more. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/a-third-of-luxe-real-estate-deals-involve-suspicious-activity.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/a-third-of-luxe-real-estate-... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-money-us-elections/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-...
  - gammateam 8y ago
    > subject of a suspicious activity report OH come on. Bank tellers file suspicious activity reports for any arbitrary reason. The only people these SARs ensnare are poor-ish people that accidentally structured a cash transaction and it looked like they were trying to avoid the $10,000 reporting threshold. I've read enough appeals court cases to see that it doesn't catch actual money laundering from illicit sources. And with the real estate industry successfully lobbying Congress from an exemption to anti-money laundering laws, I don't think these wealthy people will ever be investigated from a "Suspicious Activity Report" since there isn't a legal framework to further investigate.
    - drawkbox 8y ago
      Agreed on messing with small players and real estate getting favorable treatment, but did you miss the part where they were in million+ properties with shell corporations? > Treasury this week expanded and extended a program targeting luxury real estate deals in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets to prevent the use of real estate for money-laundering by overseas buyers. The program was designed to prevent buyers from using shell company's or LLC's to hide the identities of the real buyers.
      - gammateam 8y ago
        Yeah I remember when that article came out. Did it work? The federal government doesn't regulate what kind of business entities their states offer. And you can always use a lawyer on the incorporation forms if that state asks for more info and have your whole entity protected by client attorney privilege. There's no probable cause to raid the lawyer, and the money is magically clean in the property now.
  - Retric 8y ago
    When you exclude the bulk of the market, saying the 1/3 of the remainder does not say much.
  - snarf21 8y ago
    I was told that some of it isn't completely money laundering but the only way to get legitimate money out of countries like China.
  - DINKDINK 8y ago
    >"about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report." There are so many issues with conclusions like this but the simplest question to ask first is, "What's the SAR rate for the equivalent tronche of people who aren't involved in money laundering?". This analysis probably suffers from Berkson's Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiEkxSaRlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiEkxSaRlU
- lmm 8y ago
  Cracking down on real estate (or metals, per another comment) has to be done carefully because there are legitimate reasons to want to own metals or real estate. There's no analogous legitimate reason you'd want to own a particular string of random numbers; evading the rule of law is the entire market in those.
  - darawk 8y ago
    The desire to own large quantities of precious metals is definitely no more legitimate than the desire to own cryptocurrency.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      I disagree. In the very least, precious metals are shiny and dont rust. You can't wear crypto.
      - lawn 8y ago
        It will look funny to wear gold bricks.
      - darawk 8y ago
        Sure, but you can't transmit gold cheaply and frictionlessly across national boundaries.
    - hueving 8y ago
      Precious metals have a very long history of protecting against inflation risk, which is why many investors own them. Crypto currency is not anywhere near that category because they haven't been around even 20 years and the prices suffer from severe instability.
- dba7dba 8y ago
  I also came in to comment about property/real estate being THE biggest and safest vehicle for hiding dirty money.
rrggrr 8y ago
Please... the metals markets, where holdings can be reconstituted, aggregated, faked and leveraged is the undisputed champion for big time laundering. Two favorite examples: https://qz.com/216059/chinas-investigation-into-missing-metal-could-spark-a-much-bigger-crisis/ https://qz.com/216059/chinas-investigation-into-missing-meta... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article195552089.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article195552089.html
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Not to discount the metal markets or just corrupt banking, but crypto currency clearly has the advantage of being transmissible weightlessly anywhere in the world.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    Imaginary metal is weightless as well :-) And what it doesn't have is a chain of transaction receipts showing where it has been.
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      Imaginary metal is akin to a bank token, indeed easy to transport but connected to people & institutions (kind of like, money). And it eventually has to be traded for real metal. Just about everything of value has it's pluses and minuses for avoiding state scrutiny (land, cash, enterprises dealing in a lot of cash, start-ups needings lots of cash, halal banking, underground economy equivalents, etc, etc). With the interlocked problems of capital controls, drug cartels, failing states and resource economies (China, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, Congo, etc), the river of dirty money is huge and goes everywhere. And efforts at control are naturally quite large too ("how much control over how dirty a flow" is what the lobbyists now place bids for, right, with the money itself coming partly from these flows. But those who've escape enough of their capital want to plug up the capital of their competitors, naturally). Still, the advantage of turning a raw resource (energy) into money is a tremendous boon to those who control resources but don't technically own them (from bureaucrats to warlords). And, of course, the blockchain shows the flow of tokens from account to account but it neither shows who owns the account nor the reason for the flow. Someone might guess but guesses aren't evidence in a conveniently large number of places.
dajohnson89 8y ago
non-paywall link please?
- gruez 8y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-dirty-money-disappears-into-the-black-hole-of-cryptocurrency-1538149743 https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...
  - tempuser24 8y ago
    I haven't seen this work around before. Brilliant in it's simplicity.
    - airstrike 8y ago
      you can always just add the prefix "full" right before wsj.com like this https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/facebook-flaw-allowed-hackers-to-take-over-user-accounts-1538153947?mod=hp_lead_pos1 https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/facebook-flaw-allowed-hacke...
- ur-whale 8y ago
  http://archive.is/cntYK http://archive.is/cntYK
seibelj 8y ago
Meanwhile, a fully-regulated and ostensibly compliant EU bank in Denmark laundered $233 billion through a single bank branch [0]. I would argue that crypto is actually an investigator's dream, as you can trace transactions instantly through the blockchain without needing to follow the money in multiple jurisdictions, faxes, waiting periods, cooperating with other law enforcement, etc. etc. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/19/ceo-denmark-bank-quits-amid-an-alleged-billion-money-laundering-investigation/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fcf63e625508 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/19/ceo-denma...
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I think this is under appreciated by the press as well. Money is going to get washed, there is just too much of it not too and everyone has a price. Efforts to suggest that "this" is the best reason to abolish crypto currencies have struggled (in my opinion) to make this case.
  - wheelie_boy 8y ago
    To me the argument is the opposite: what is the reason for cryptocurrencies to exist if not for money laundering and generally avoiding regulations/fees you'd otherwise be subject to?
    - seibelj 8y ago
      The desire to have a currency not controlled by a government? Whether you think that's a good thing or not, it is still a valid reason
      - vinceguidry 8y ago
        Those two are the exact same goal. Just wrapped in different ideologies and highlighting different aspects of the tradeoff. But they're saying the same thing. The only thing that makes money laundering what it is is governments deciding what are good ways to make money.
gammateam 8y ago
This is a Monero puffpiece masquerading as a vilification of Shapeshift. Erik Voorhees' "cavalier" approach to the man's collection efforts are honest in that even the best Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer implementation would not reveal the origin and destination of the funds when using Monero. The quaint mention of Monero in this article is foreshadowing of more amazing informative pieces about this form of money. In this piece, they intentionally conflate what Shapeshift does with how other exchanges operate. They intentionally conflate Monero with all cryptocurrencies. It is an interesting way of writing But I think this will be followed up with more productive articles The Wanna-cry ransomware did not collect millions of dollars. It barely collected $100,000 before the patch rolled out. The very public nature of the Wanna-cry attack and patch revealed that the same NSA tool was being used on a Monero mining botnet for weeks before hand already. and THAT was making millions of dollars, but the ransomware people ruined it! Alright I'm going to call it, this is shoddy journalism. Glad to see the Monero mention
- samstave 8y ago
  Where can I learn more about the monero nsa mining botnet?
  - blotter_paper 8y ago
    I'm not sure whether or not you misread GP, but just to clarify in case, GP means that the malware used code that was leaked from the NSA, not that the NSA was directly involved in making the botnet. This popped up in google: https://threatpost.com/pyromine-uses-nsa-exploit-for-monero-mining-and-backdoors/131472/ https://threatpost.com/pyromine-uses-nsa-exploit-for-monero-...
  - gammateam 8y ago
    Basically Shadowbrokers claimed to hack the NSA with a datadump of the NSA's hacking tools. They offered a bounty for it and nobody took it Eventually they released a sample which contained real exploits with unheard of vulnerabilities A few weeks later the Wanna-Cry ransomware had weaponized those vulnerabilities and spread world wide really quickly, attracting way too much attention and a fix rolled out The attention revealed that the exploit had been weaponized almost immediately a few weeks earlier for a very smart and stealthy Monero mining botnet, which made way more than Wannacry did People still use the leaked NSA exploits to hack computers and run Monero botnets. https://cointelegraph.com/news/newly-detected-malware-uses-nsa-exploit-to-mine-monero-over-500k-pcs-infected https://cointelegraph.com/news/newly-detected-malware-uses-n... yes, we've all heard misinformation about bitcoin being untrackable, but Monero is the real deal for now, with the pros and cons and possible attack vectors researched and published about
CryptoPunk 8y ago
The quest to stop "money laundering" is totalitarian in nature. It is not reasonable to stop crime by way of having total awareness of the source of every individual's financial holdings. Such a quest rationalizes warrantless mass-surveillance of the economy, which gives AML agencies and their deputies in the banking sector an unreasonably broad view of the private financial interactions taking place in the economy, and by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness. Money is only useful to the extent that every unit is interchangable, accepted at face value without prejudice, and can be used without compromising its user's privacy. That means all money must be assumed 'clean' unless proven dirty. Treating everyone as suspect and forcing them prove their money was legitimately acquired in order to utilize it is taking exactly the opposite track.
- olefoo 8y ago
  > by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness. I wonder how you could model that. And as a corollary, how to monitor the effect in the real world?
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    Loss of fungibility has implications for liquidity, and through its centralization of power / creation of information asymmetries, rent-seeking and public choice theory. Maybe these effects could be modelled. I imagine monitoring it could be difficult because the presence of fungibility implies non-traceablility/privacy, meaning observation changes the phenomenon, sort of like the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
- danans 8y ago
  > The quest to stop "money laundering" is totalitarian in nature. The point is to raise the risk/cost of money laundering and to minimize its occurrence, otherwise financial fraud becomes culturally normalized, and not something people avoid. For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities. That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions. > by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering. Most transactions of life fall well below the 10k reporting limit, and those that are above (i.e. purchasing a car) tend to be on-the-record.
gammateam 8y ago
> "The exchange’s system lets people see which anonymous wallets received cryptocurrency, but in the case of Monero, recipient addresses and transaction amounts remain secret and the trail is severed." > The way this reads makes it seem like the Shapeshift exchange is intentionally hiding something in order to facilitate criminals. This is negligent journalism deliberately written for you to form a particular opinion about cryptocurrencies in general. The Monero payment network doesn't publicly reveal recipient addresses and transaction amounts? This is a feature. the real story is in the comments.

101 points by chollida1 8y ago

Given the incredible amounts of dirty money that goes into global property/real estate there is an element of chutzpah about dinging crypto https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1906500.McMafia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1906500.McMafia

drawkbox 8y ago
When they looked into high-end real-estate in 2016, up to 30% of all deals were suspicious of being money laundering. [1] They looked just primarily at New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets. > The rules cover properties purchased for more than $3 million in Manhattan, properties over $1 million in the southern Florida locations, over $2 million in the California locations and more than $3 million in the Hawaii locations. > Treasury said that among the transactions covered by the rules over the past year "about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report." It makes you wonder how much the real estate market is inflated due to money laundering and foreign funds flowing in for washing or investments, keeping real customers out of the market. Fact is money laundering is a problem in real-estate, art, crypto, political campaigns [2] (with Citizens United) and more. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/a-third-of-luxe-real-estate-deals-involve-suspicious-activity.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/a-third-of-luxe-real-estate-... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-money-us-elections/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-...
- gammateam 8y ago
  > subject of a suspicious activity report OH come on. Bank tellers file suspicious activity reports for any arbitrary reason. The only people these SARs ensnare are poor-ish people that accidentally structured a cash transaction and it looked like they were trying to avoid the $10,000 reporting threshold. I've read enough appeals court cases to see that it doesn't catch actual money laundering from illicit sources. And with the real estate industry successfully lobbying Congress from an exemption to anti-money laundering laws, I don't think these wealthy people will ever be investigated from a "Suspicious Activity Report" since there isn't a legal framework to further investigate.
  - drawkbox 8y ago
    Agreed on messing with small players and real estate getting favorable treatment, but did you miss the part where they were in million+ properties with shell corporations? > Treasury this week expanded and extended a program targeting luxury real estate deals in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets to prevent the use of real estate for money-laundering by overseas buyers. The program was designed to prevent buyers from using shell company's or LLC's to hide the identities of the real buyers.
    - gammateam 8y ago
      Yeah I remember when that article came out. Did it work? The federal government doesn't regulate what kind of business entities their states offer. And you can always use a lawyer on the incorporation forms if that state asks for more info and have your whole entity protected by client attorney privilege. There's no probable cause to raid the lawyer, and the money is magically clean in the property now.
- Retric 8y ago
  When you exclude the bulk of the market, saying the 1/3 of the remainder does not say much.
- snarf21 8y ago
  I was told that some of it isn't completely money laundering but the only way to get legitimate money out of countries like China.
- DINKDINK 8y ago
  >"about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report." There are so many issues with conclusions like this but the simplest question to ask first is, "What's the SAR rate for the equivalent tronche of people who aren't involved in money laundering?". This analysis probably suffers from Berkson's Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiEkxSaRlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiEkxSaRlU
lmm 8y ago
Cracking down on real estate (or metals, per another comment) has to be done carefully because there are legitimate reasons to want to own metals or real estate. There's no analogous legitimate reason you'd want to own a particular string of random numbers; evading the rule of law is the entire market in those.
- darawk 8y ago
  The desire to own large quantities of precious metals is definitely no more legitimate than the desire to own cryptocurrency.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    I disagree. In the very least, precious metals are shiny and dont rust. You can't wear crypto.
    - lawn 8y ago
      It will look funny to wear gold bricks.
    - darawk 8y ago
      Sure, but you can't transmit gold cheaply and frictionlessly across national boundaries.
  - hueving 8y ago
    Precious metals have a very long history of protecting against inflation risk, which is why many investors own them. Crypto currency is not anywhere near that category because they haven't been around even 20 years and the prices suffer from severe instability.
dba7dba 8y ago
I also came in to comment about property/real estate being THE biggest and safest vehicle for hiding dirty money.

rrggrr 8y ago

Please... the metals markets, where holdings can be reconstituted, aggregated, faked and leveraged is the undisputed champion for big time laundering. Two favorite examples: https://qz.com/216059/chinas-investigation-into-missing-metal-could-spark-a-much-bigger-crisis/ https://qz.com/216059/chinas-investigation-into-missing-meta... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article195552089.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article195552089.html

joe_the_user 8y ago
Not to discount the metal markets or just corrupt banking, but crypto currency clearly has the advantage of being transmissible weightlessly anywhere in the world.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Imaginary metal is weightless as well :-) And what it doesn't have is a chain of transaction receipts showing where it has been.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Imaginary metal is akin to a bank token, indeed easy to transport but connected to people & institutions (kind of like, money). And it eventually has to be traded for real metal. Just about everything of value has it's pluses and minuses for avoiding state scrutiny (land, cash, enterprises dealing in a lot of cash, start-ups needings lots of cash, halal banking, underground economy equivalents, etc, etc). With the interlocked problems of capital controls, drug cartels, failing states and resource economies (China, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, Congo, etc), the river of dirty money is huge and goes everywhere. And efforts at control are naturally quite large too ("how much control over how dirty a flow" is what the lobbyists now place bids for, right, with the money itself coming partly from these flows. But those who've escape enough of their capital want to plug up the capital of their competitors, naturally). Still, the advantage of turning a raw resource (energy) into money is a tremendous boon to those who control resources but don't technically own them (from bureaucrats to warlords). And, of course, the blockchain shows the flow of tokens from account to account but it neither shows who owns the account nor the reason for the flow. Someone might guess but guesses aren't evidence in a conveniently large number of places.

dajohnson89 8y ago

non-paywall link please?

gruez 8y ago
https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-dirty-money-disappears-into-the-black-hole-of-cryptocurrency-1538149743 https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...
- tempuser24 8y ago
  I haven't seen this work around before. Brilliant in it's simplicity.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    you can always just add the prefix "full" right before wsj.com like this https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/facebook-flaw-allowed-hackers-to-take-over-user-accounts-1538153947?mod=hp_lead_pos1 https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/facebook-flaw-allowed-hacke...
ur-whale 8y ago
http://archive.is/cntYK http://archive.is/cntYK

seibelj 8y ago

Meanwhile, a fully-regulated and ostensibly compliant EU bank in Denmark laundered $233 billion through a single bank branch [0]. I would argue that crypto is actually an investigator's dream, as you can trace transactions instantly through the blockchain without needing to follow the money in multiple jurisdictions, faxes, waiting periods, cooperating with other law enforcement, etc. etc. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/19/ceo-denmark-bank-quits-amid-an-alleged-billion-money-laundering-investigation/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fcf63e625508 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/19/ceo-denma...

ChuckMcM 8y ago
I think this is under appreciated by the press as well. Money is going to get washed, there is just too much of it not too and everyone has a price. Efforts to suggest that "this" is the best reason to abolish crypto currencies have struggled (in my opinion) to make this case.
- wheelie_boy 8y ago
  To me the argument is the opposite: what is the reason for cryptocurrencies to exist if not for money laundering and generally avoiding regulations/fees you'd otherwise be subject to?
  - seibelj 8y ago
    The desire to have a currency not controlled by a government? Whether you think that's a good thing or not, it is still a valid reason
    - vinceguidry 8y ago
      Those two are the exact same goal. Just wrapped in different ideologies and highlighting different aspects of the tradeoff. But they're saying the same thing. The only thing that makes money laundering what it is is governments deciding what are good ways to make money.

gammateam 8y ago

This is a Monero puffpiece masquerading as a vilification of Shapeshift. Erik Voorhees' "cavalier" approach to the man's collection efforts are honest in that even the best Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer implementation would not reveal the origin and destination of the funds when using Monero. The quaint mention of Monero in this article is foreshadowing of more amazing informative pieces about this form of money. In this piece, they intentionally conflate what Shapeshift does with how other exchanges operate. They intentionally conflate Monero with all cryptocurrencies. It is an interesting way of writing But I think this will be followed up with more productive articles The Wanna-cry ransomware did not collect millions of dollars. It barely collected $100,000 before the patch rolled out. The very public nature of the Wanna-cry attack and patch revealed that the same NSA tool was being used on a Monero mining botnet for weeks before hand already. and THAT was making millions of dollars, but the ransomware people ruined it! Alright I'm going to call it, this is shoddy journalism. Glad to see the Monero mention

samstave 8y ago
Where can I learn more about the monero nsa mining botnet?
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  I'm not sure whether or not you misread GP, but just to clarify in case, GP means that the malware used code that was leaked from the NSA, not that the NSA was directly involved in making the botnet. This popped up in google: https://threatpost.com/pyromine-uses-nsa-exploit-for-monero-mining-and-backdoors/131472/ https://threatpost.com/pyromine-uses-nsa-exploit-for-monero-...
- gammateam 8y ago
  Basically Shadowbrokers claimed to hack the NSA with a datadump of the NSA's hacking tools. They offered a bounty for it and nobody took it Eventually they released a sample which contained real exploits with unheard of vulnerabilities A few weeks later the Wanna-Cry ransomware had weaponized those vulnerabilities and spread world wide really quickly, attracting way too much attention and a fix rolled out The attention revealed that the exploit had been weaponized almost immediately a few weeks earlier for a very smart and stealthy Monero mining botnet, which made way more than Wannacry did People still use the leaked NSA exploits to hack computers and run Monero botnets. https://cointelegraph.com/news/newly-detected-malware-uses-nsa-exploit-to-mine-monero-over-500k-pcs-infected https://cointelegraph.com/news/newly-detected-malware-uses-n... yes, we've all heard misinformation about bitcoin being untrackable, but Monero is the real deal for now, with the pros and cons and possible attack vectors researched and published about

CryptoPunk 8y ago

The quest to stop "money laundering" is totalitarian in nature. It is not reasonable to stop crime by way of having total awareness of the source of every individual's financial holdings. Such a quest rationalizes warrantless mass-surveillance of the economy, which gives AML agencies and their deputies in the banking sector an unreasonably broad view of the private financial interactions taking place in the economy, and by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness. Money is only useful to the extent that every unit is interchangable, accepted at face value without prejudice, and can be used without compromising its user's privacy. That means all money must be assumed 'clean' unless proven dirty. Treating everyone as suspect and forcing them prove their money was legitimately acquired in order to utilize it is taking exactly the opposite track.

olefoo 8y ago
> by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness. I wonder how you could model that. And as a corollary, how to monitor the effect in the real world?
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  Loss of fungibility has implications for liquidity, and through its centralization of power / creation of information asymmetries, rent-seeking and public choice theory. Maybe these effects could be modelled. I imagine monitoring it could be difficult because the presence of fungibility implies non-traceablility/privacy, meaning observation changes the phenomenon, sort of like the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
danans 8y ago
> The quest to stop "money laundering" is totalitarian in nature. The point is to raise the risk/cost of money laundering and to minimize its occurrence, otherwise financial fraud becomes culturally normalized, and not something people avoid. For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities. That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions. > by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering. Most transactions of life fall well below the 10k reporting limit, and those that are above (i.e. purchasing a car) tend to be on-the-record.

gammateam 8y ago

> "The exchange’s system lets people see which anonymous wallets received cryptocurrency, but in the case of Monero, recipient addresses and transaction amounts remain secret and the trail is severed." > The way this reads makes it seem like the Shapeshift exchange is intentionally hiding something in order to facilitate criminals. This is negligent journalism deliberately written for you to form a particular opinion about cryptocurrencies in general. The Monero payment network doesn't publicly reveal recipient addresses and transaction amounts? This is a feature. the real story is in the comments.