6 ms·

>If you try to make something private, then you're helping money launderers, criminals and pedophiles. But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money la

>If you try to make something private, then you're helping money launderers, criminals and pedophiles. But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely. >Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply. It's enough for you to know that we are experts and have your best interests in mind. You don't need to concern yourself with how much money there is, how its supply is managed or the potential negative effects of our manipulation, you wouldn't understand the implications anyway. You mean to say that we live in a democracy. We elect our representatives, and they pick who runs these institutions. They are relatively "undemocratic" because when politicians are able to manipulate the interest rates directly, well things are perhaps even worse.

jcbrand 4y ago
But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. I'm not, I'm pointing out the rhetorical techniques being used to delegitimize people who try to create privacy tools. You mean to say that we live in a democracy. We elect our representatives, and they pick who runs these institutions. It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy. Central banks are privately owned and/or structured in such a way as to not be beholden to political pressure (for the somewhat justifiable reason that politicians are even worse at managing monetary policy).
- qsort 4y ago
  > It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy Latinate words are not a useful cover when you're lying. All Western central banks are effectively a branch of government and are directly responsible to Congress/euparl/$local_variant, and are run by a bunch of politicians (the chair of the Fed is Powell and the president of the ECB is Lagarde, ffs). The notion that they aren't beholden to the popular will is just ridicolous.
  - jcbrand 4y ago
    The second paragraph on Wikipedia: Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
    - Seriomino 4y ago
      You used 'privately owned' to indicate it being shady.
    - qsort 4y ago
      The paper linked in the Wikipedia citation for that line has the following in its abstract: "The governance of central banks has two dimensions: corporate governance and public governance. Public governance is an institutional framework whereby the general public governs a central bank by and through the legislative and executive bodies in a country (...)". "Independence of the central bank" means independence from direct intrusion by the executive branch, in the same sense the judiciary is independent from political interference.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      So, generally, are courts, police and civil servants. That doesn’t mean that those are not government institutions.
- dools 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jcbrand 4y ago
    Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch? The Federal Reserve (by far the most important one) is privately owned, as are Belgium, Greece, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and the Bank of Italy. The ECB is owned by central banks of member states, some of which are privately owned. Private ownership is any case one issue, the other is the fact the CBs are structured in such a way to be resistant to political pressure and (meaningful) oversight.
    - dools 4y ago
      > Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch? This is a good start: https://youtu.be/sT1KoXayDNU https://youtu.be/sT1KoXayDNU
      - jcbrand 4y ago
        I'm familiar with Mosler and MMT. MMT requires the government to raise taxes once inflation starts rising due to previous money printing. What are governments doing now? They are actually thinking of handing out more money to people to offset the effects of inflation (thereby making the inflation worse). In other words, MMT requires governments to always do the right thing, which they don't. That's ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of MMT which are by no means unassailable.
        dools 4y ago
        > MMT requires the government to raise taxes once inflation starts rising due to previous money printing. That’s a common misconception. Have you seen any MMT economist advocate a tax increase recently? Here is an excellent podcast with one of the most eminent MMT scholars Randall Wray discussing his recent publication on how to deal with inflation in the US currently: https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-173-inflation-the-feds-crash-landing-with-l-randall-wray/ https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-173-inf... Here is the publication: https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_157.pdf https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_157.pdf
kd913 4y ago
>money launderers, criminals and pedophiles. I think it's important to expand on the above because the above terms are tame. They give an impression of individual small time criminals. It's North Korea, Russia, dictators and despots across the world, the cartels, organized criminals. Large scale Tax avoiders, human traffickers, drug traffickers, weapon smugglers. It's the organized big money criminals, both high and low class that fund the worst aspects of humanity.
- jcbrand 4y ago
  Funnily enough, the people who live under dictators, despots, cartels and organized criminals often more easily realise the benefits of money that cannot be censored, cannot have its issuance be manipulated, is permissionless and very difficult to confiscate. (Talking about Bitcoin here. Not all crypto applies)
  - kd913 4y ago
    Which examples? The ones who take hush money and are subject to increased violence from an increasingly powerful cartel? The ones who are paying for these open ponzi schemes by having their electricity stolen by the state? How about El Salvador, or Argentina, or Nigeria where the poorest lost significant chunks of their capital from btc crash to terra/luna collapse.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies? D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag? The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the relevant problems are technical: we've solved trust! (Between machines negotiating over a network). We've solved currency manipulation (oh its not a currency, it's an asset; and oh it can be manipulated by the 3 people who own 50% of it). All the problems are social, not technological. And crypto makes all of them worse! By an order of magnitude worse.
    - Zerverus 4y ago
      Moreso ordinary people using fully traceable digital money in these situations is a special kind of stupid
olalonde 4y ago
> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely. Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimated 1.7 billion worldwide) and don't actually stop criminals. There's a serious case to be made for putting an end to that war and diverting those resources to old school crime fighting. https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-expensive https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-...
- Seriomino 4y ago
  Trustworthy source you have: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates." I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care. And crypto is not providing any solution to this at all. So why not fixing that issue inside the crypto bro fan club first and than trying to replace our current fiat with it?
  - cdiddy2 4y ago
    Alternative source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
  - olalonde 4y ago
    > I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care. I think you're confusing money laundering and tax evasion.
- spacebanana7 4y ago
  In the UK, spending by financial services firms on AML compliance [1] exceeds all police spending [2] (£28.7 Bn vs £21.47Bn). This represents a massive misallocation of resources. Public safety would almost certainly be improved if we doubled police spending by slashing AML burdens by 2/3rds. Unfortunately it's hard for politicians address crime by raising taxes to fund real police but easy for them to attempt to address crime by increasing AML regulation, even if the latter is barely effective. [1] https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/cutting-the-costs-of-aml-compliance/ https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/cutting-the-costs-o... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/298637/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-police-services/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298637/united-kingdom-uk...

jcbrand 4y ago

But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. I'm not, I'm pointing out the rhetorical techniques being used to delegitimize people who try to create privacy tools. You mean to say that we live in a democracy. We elect our representatives, and they pick who runs these institutions. It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy. Central banks are privately owned and/or structured in such a way as to not be beholden to political pressure (for the somewhat justifiable reason that politicians are even worse at managing monetary policy).

qsort 4y ago
> It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy Latinate words are not a useful cover when you're lying. All Western central banks are effectively a branch of government and are directly responsible to Congress/euparl/$local_variant, and are run by a bunch of politicians (the chair of the Fed is Powell and the president of the ECB is Lagarde, ffs). The notion that they aren't beholden to the popular will is just ridicolous.
- jcbrand 4y ago
  The second paragraph on Wikipedia: Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
  - Seriomino 4y ago
    You used 'privately owned' to indicate it being shady.
  - qsort 4y ago
    The paper linked in the Wikipedia citation for that line has the following in its abstract: "The governance of central banks has two dimensions: corporate governance and public governance. Public governance is an institutional framework whereby the general public governs a central bank by and through the legislative and executive bodies in a country (...)". "Independence of the central bank" means independence from direct intrusion by the executive branch, in the same sense the judiciary is independent from political interference.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    So, generally, are courts, police and civil servants. That doesn’t mean that those are not government institutions.
dools 4y ago
[flagged]
- jcbrand 4y ago
  Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch? The Federal Reserve (by far the most important one) is privately owned, as are Belgium, Greece, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and the Bank of Italy. The ECB is owned by central banks of member states, some of which are privately owned. Private ownership is any case one issue, the other is the fact the CBs are structured in such a way to be resistant to political pressure and (meaningful) oversight.
  - dools 4y ago
    > Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch? This is a good start: https://youtu.be/sT1KoXayDNU https://youtu.be/sT1KoXayDNU
    - jcbrand 4y ago
      I'm familiar with Mosler and MMT. MMT requires the government to raise taxes once inflation starts rising due to previous money printing. What are governments doing now? They are actually thinking of handing out more money to people to offset the effects of inflation (thereby making the inflation worse). In other words, MMT requires governments to always do the right thing, which they don't. That's ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of MMT which are by no means unassailable.
      - dools 4y ago
        > MMT requires the government to raise taxes once inflation starts rising due to previous money printing. That’s a common misconception. Have you seen any MMT economist advocate a tax increase recently? Here is an excellent podcast with one of the most eminent MMT scholars Randall Wray discussing his recent publication on how to deal with inflation in the US currently: https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-173-inflation-the-feds-crash-landing-with-l-randall-wray/ https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-173-inf... Here is the publication: https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_157.pdf https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_157.pdf

kd913 4y ago

>money launderers, criminals and pedophiles. I think it's important to expand on the above because the above terms are tame. They give an impression of individual small time criminals. It's North Korea, Russia, dictators and despots across the world, the cartels, organized criminals. Large scale Tax avoiders, human traffickers, drug traffickers, weapon smugglers. It's the organized big money criminals, both high and low class that fund the worst aspects of humanity.

jcbrand 4y ago
Funnily enough, the people who live under dictators, despots, cartels and organized criminals often more easily realise the benefits of money that cannot be censored, cannot have its issuance be manipulated, is permissionless and very difficult to confiscate. (Talking about Bitcoin here. Not all crypto applies)
- kd913 4y ago
  Which examples? The ones who take hush money and are subject to increased violence from an increasingly powerful cartel? The ones who are paying for these open ponzi schemes by having their electricity stolen by the state? How about El Salvador, or Argentina, or Nigeria where the poorest lost significant chunks of their capital from btc crash to terra/luna collapse.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies? D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag? The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the relevant problems are technical: we've solved trust! (Between machines negotiating over a network). We've solved currency manipulation (oh its not a currency, it's an asset; and oh it can be manipulated by the 3 people who own 50% of it). All the problems are social, not technological. And crypto makes all of them worse! By an order of magnitude worse.
  - Zerverus 4y ago
    Moreso ordinary people using fully traceable digital money in these situations is a special kind of stupid

olalonde 4y ago

> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely. Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimated 1.7 billion worldwide) and don't actually stop criminals. There's a serious case to be made for putting an end to that war and diverting those resources to old school crime fighting. https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-expensive https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-...

Seriomino 4y ago
Trustworthy source you have: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates." I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care. And crypto is not providing any solution to this at all. So why not fixing that issue inside the crypto bro fan club first and than trying to replace our current fiat with it?
- cdiddy2 4y ago
  Alternative source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
- olalonde 4y ago
  > I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care. I think you're confusing money laundering and tax evasion.
spacebanana7 4y ago
In the UK, spending by financial services firms on AML compliance [1] exceeds all police spending [2] (£28.7 Bn vs £21.47Bn). This represents a massive misallocation of resources. Public safety would almost certainly be improved if we doubled police spending by slashing AML burdens by 2/3rds. Unfortunately it's hard for politicians address crime by raising taxes to fund real police but easy for them to attempt to address crime by increasing AML regulation, even if the latter is barely effective. [1] https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/cutting-the-costs-of-aml-compliance/ https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/cutting-the-costs-o... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/298637/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-police-services/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298637/united-kingdom-uk...