> The trouble is that the baseline level of inconvenience doesn't phase a criminal enterprise, because to even exist it already has to incur the cost of operati

> The trouble is that the baseline level of inconvenience doesn't phase a criminal enterprise, because to even exist it already has to incur the cost of operating unlawfully and risk being shut down and compensate employees for the risk of being charged with a crime, regardless of AML. Operating an illegal enterprise in such a manner that cash can make it past AML measures and eventually be spent by the enterprise's owners, and the concomitant problem of structuring the enterprise's bookkeeping and tax reporting so it has enough plausibility to avoid prosecution, is more than an inconvenience. It's the central business problem the owners of those enterprises face. Talking about their business costs and risks "regardless of AML" doesn't really make a lot of sense. > But the AML rules don't only inconvenience people who are really doing something wrong. There are obvious privacy problems with associating every purchase anyone makes with their name, and chilling effects for what people are willing to buy. It creates friction in things that aren't illegal. This problem, the effects of which you're wildly overstating, has little or nothing to do with AML measures. (You mentioned a chilling effect on things that aren't illegal - are we just talking about stuff that people don't want their spouses to see on the credit card bill?) It's true that every purchase you make without cash will have a lot of detail associated with it, stored electronically and held by the banks and credit cards processors. This all predates modern AML rules by decades. You would have to do something very unusual for one of your transactions to "create friction" with your bank under the guise of AML rules. If it has ever happened to you, I'm super curious about the circumstances. Insofar as AML and other more modern, security-related rules might inconvenience ordinary people, they tend to affect people when opening an account, not when transacting.