8 ms·

It seems strange to me that there is a consensus on this site that communications privacy is a human right but that financial privacy is a terrible evil. In fa

by from 4y ago

It seems strange to me that there is a consensus on this site that communications privacy is a human right but that financial privacy is a terrible evil. In fact all of the arguments pro/con (terrorists, drug dealers, etc can benefit from it) are basically identical yet there exists this double standard. The truth is that these now-sacred laws that ended financial privacy really only started being enforced in America in the 80s and their European equivalents in the late 90s. Are we really any safer now than we were then? The proponents of these laws always claim that if only they could close the loopholes they would be successful. First it was bearer shares, then it was "shell banks", then it was money orders, now it's gift cards, luxury real estate, and cryptocurrency. I am skeptical that closing all these supposed loopholes will actually move the needle on crime. As long as you can 10x your money bringing cocaine from Colombia to America or robocalling grandmas, people are going to do it and new reporting requirements or whatever may make them pay 25% for laundering instead of 10% but it won't put them out of business.

nrb 4y ago
I have to believe the motivation is much more likely placed with the treasury having the most complete view of everyone’s finances, seeing as basically every dollar earned in the US was done so on the shoulders of tax revenue-directed infrastructure, projects, research, and defense apparatus. Something like this going mainstream would require us to completely reform the way the country collects revenue and might even affect our access to debt, so (in their eyes) why not just stomp out the promising ones with whatever justification is easiest?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > the treasury having the most complete view of everyone’s finances, seeing as basically every dollar earned in the US Have you followed a financial-crimes investigation? Nobody knows where jack is. The American payment system is essentially decentralized [1]. Each bank maintains its own books and records and periodically compares parts of them with others and a summary with the central bank to promote consistency. The IRS and Treasury don't systematically share records. (Bureaucratic imperatives, after all.) That's why when the FBI or the CIA or whomever want financial records they have to quietly subpoena banks. To assemble records they do not have. > this going mainstream would require us to completely reform the way the country collects revenue and might even affect our access to debt Wall Street has enthusiastically embraced crypto. It's cheaper to run, permits higher fee loading and is regulatory greenspace, which tends to favor sharks. Nothing about crypto makes taxes or debt impossible. Taxes were collected and debt raised for the millennia when cash and commodity money reigned. Crypto is easier to track than either of those. [1] Aside: the difference between crypto and traditional rails isn't decentralization. It's eager evaluation. The blockchain is always current everywhere. Bank records are not. The latter is computationally cheaper, but at the cost of more error. Centralized banking would involve everyone having an account at the Fed. It has been suggested [a]. [a] https://econreview.berkeley.edu/fed-accounts-and-the-right-to-save/ https://econreview.berkeley.edu/fed-accounts-and-the-right-t...
- from 4y ago
  I am skeptical of this because if they just wanted to raise revenue at the expense of privacy there are a lot easier ways to do it. They could make FBAR apply domestically. Or just require banks report checks and wires over 50k. Banning Tornado Cash is a kind of decision made by self styled counterproliferation/illicit finance/terror finance/anti corruption "experts."
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > require banks report checks and wires over 50k There is no reporting requirement, but a record-keeping one [1]. [1] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/bsa_quickrefguide.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/bsa_quickr...
    - from 4y ago
      Yes but this is really only useful for them after they already discovered a target of investigation. Having this information for everyone would make the initial detection of tax evaders substantially easier.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > this information for everyone would make the initial detection of tax evaders substantially easier The IRS and FinCEN don’t systematically share information. (Ironically, the IRS is more restricted in this respect [1].) [1] https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-026-008 https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-026-008
ETH_start 4y ago
Money has been massively stigmatized, because that is a prerequisite for centralizing control over economic interaction. The beneficiaries of this centralized control are any one who depends on government spending or regulatory restrictions for their job, it's your parents and neighbours, your partner and cousin. This is a massive cohort - who are over-represented in the top 10% of income earners [1] - who participate in the manufacturing of consent for restrictions on our right to engage in mutually voluntary economic interactions with other consenting adults. [1] https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-workers-earn-143000-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
dan-robertson 4y ago
1. I would not call it consensus, for example the top comment on this article disagrees with that ‘consensus’ 2. Here are two nuanced arguments about each that I’ve seen: Communications privacy is good in the small and mirrors the world with earlier technology with some differences. In the large it can allow maintaining much larger conspiracies than were previously possible with private meetings. One may consider it acceptable from a privacy and free speech perspective to allow secret communication in small groups but less secret communication in large groups. Indeed for political speech in a modern democracy you generally want it in public anyway, and WhatsApp and signal have small group sizes so you get this anyway. For very large groups, leaks seem hard to avoid. A counter argument might be that militaries / companies are in some sense like conspiracies in the way they want to keep state/trade secrets. However in typical democracies there may be document release schedules/transparency laws and internal company information may be revealed through patents, subpoenas, or just plain old leaks. The money argument is that whereas people typically have similar amounts of private speech, some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others. Privacy for communication is then reasonably fairly distributed across the population (though those with more to hide may gain more) whereas privacy for money is mostly an advantage for the people with lots of it. Giving the people who are already rich and powerful this kind of advantage in avoiding scrutiny/taxes may not be considered fair or desirable. A counter argument could be that it is unfair for the rich to be exposed to such increased scrutiny merely because of their money.
- igorkraw 4y ago
  > A counter argument could be that it is unfair for the rich to be exposed to such increased scrutiny merely because of their money I think it is very fine to discriminate against people based in things that give them enormous power, quality if life and they can easily get rid of. Unlike being discriminated and scrutinized for having no money , you can easily escape scrutiny due to wealth by giving away wealth with no meaningful reduction of quality of life (after a given point)
  - terryf 4y ago
    Really? You think there is an ending to a sentence that starts with: "I think it is very fine to discriminate against people based in.." That's actually good?
bb88 4y ago
You typically can't trade speech for guns, sex slaves, child porn, drugs, etc.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Of course not speech is not money but the relationship is that both can be used to facilitate crime, yet only with respect to money is this fact to rationalize the criminalization of privacy.
credit_guy 4y ago
> financial privacy I consider myself entitled to have my Amazon purchases private. Guess what? They are. I don't need a blockchain for that.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  They’re only private until Amazon has a leak or decides to sell it to the highest bidder.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  What happens when something you want to buy becomes illegal? Imagine if your government banned weed or abortion pills or porn. Or if your country gets taken over by a dictator and you want to fund the opposition
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Yes, black markets have never existed and can only be done through the existence of cryptocurrency. That or you find a plug for your weed (like half of Europe does), abortion pills (like half of the US is about to do) or porn, and you pay with old fashioned cash. I know, not having one click order of your weed is horribly harsh.
- cowtools 4y ago
  private to whom? ridiculous statement.
- jvdizzle 4y ago
  If you think of consumer purchases when you think of financial privacy, you live in a bubble of privilege. There are literally countries where people get sent to jail for giving money to pro-democracy groups or journalists. If you're an American, imagine a scenario where rights are stripped away from people at the federal level and donating to those causes becomes illegal. Surveillance has impacts far beyond your consumerist lifestyle.
nnx 4y ago
AML is the least effective policy of all times. Infinite cost for practically zero results. 0.2% success rate while it increase costs for everyone and, worse, severely limits economic opportunity for many people in unprivileged industries/countries. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.17...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > 0.2% success rate This is the "proportion of criminal funds recovered" [1]. So of the $1.6 trillion laundered out of $2.1 trillion of estimated criminal proceeds, only a few billion were confiscated or seized. The author then argues for reducing fines on banks and financial institutions, increasing criminal asset forfeiture regimes and moving away from suspicious transaction reporting. (I agree with Nos. 2 and 3; for No. 1, I'm skeptical given the author is a consultant [2].) Tornado's sanctions were imposed by OFAC. From what we can tell, it wasn't AML reporting but criminal investigations that yielded the tip. Your source thus refutes your argument. Following the author's prescription, we'd now work to investigate everyone around Tornado and seize their assets if they're doing anything illegal. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.17... page 82 [2] https://www.amlassurance.com/better-outcomes.html https://www.amlassurance.com/better-outcomes.html
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    >>criminal asset forfeiture regimes Criminal asset forfeiture is not civil asset forfeiture. You need to actually prove someone committed a crime that generated the assets, in order to seize them, and the burden of proof is that of criminal law: beyond reasonable doubt, which is much higher than the preponderance of evidence standard of civil law. >>Following the author's prescription, we'd now work to investigate everyone around Tornado and seize their assets if they're doing anything illegal. The author didn't suggest investigating any one who privately transacts, but in any case, what you describe would be far more just than the current situation, where all Americans are having their right to use TC denied, under the pain of sanctions law, as a roundabout way of punishing North Korea.
wilde 4y ago
Why are you looking for principles when most reactions are driven by emotion? Many of crypto’s loudest representatives are smug assholes. People love seeing arrogant folks taken down a peg (deservedly or no).
fezfight 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Consultant32452 4y ago
What if I told you they never believed they would be successful when they told you they just needed to close the loopholes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Nursie 4y ago
> It seems strange to me that there is a consensus on this site that communications privacy is a human right but that financial privacy is a terrible evil Why is that strange? Financial 'privacy' allows corporate interests to buy government officials or just buy governments, it allows despots and oligarchs to move money with impunity, allows dictators to steal mercilessly from their people and 'clean' the money in other nations. And yes, it allows terrorists, drug dealers and criminals to go about their business too. These are not identical concerns to privacy of speech. To paint them as such seems overly reductive. > Are we really any safer now than we were then? We are certainly better able to fight corruption and laundering of dirty money in the west than we have been in the past, yes. Are we 'safer'? Who knows, but it's about a lot more than a bit of cocaine, it's about the integrity of democracy itself.
- leppr 4y ago
  > it's about the integrity of democracy itself. Oh please, this has nothing to do with Democracy. Democracy literally means citizen-power, while this enforcement is removing the power of citizens to come to consensus on which money they want to use. The day there's a fair election at the federal level on any core economy-related topic, then your argument could begin to have something to stand on, but right now it doesn't. This is strictly shifting power away from citizen into the hands of a few.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    No, this isn't removing some imaginary consensus process on money, it's sanctioning a criminal money-laundering operation using well established law. > The day there's a fair election at the federal level on any core economy-related topic, then your argument could begin to have something to stand on, but right now it doesn't. Just because your system is already broken doesn't mean it's a good plan to enable it to be outright bought. > This is strictly shifting power away from citizen into the hands of a few. Bullshit. That is exactly what so-called financial privacy does. "The many" are not incentivised to hide their financial movements because they are uninteresting. "The many" are not using ethereum-based money laundering tools, nor will they. Cryptocurrency in general is already a niche activity of techbros and crimininals. The very, very few.
throwaway-jim 4y ago
I've seen people loose 40% laundering gift cards.
mschuster91 4y ago
> The truth is that these now-sacred laws that ended financial privacy really only started being enforced in America in the 80s and their European equivalents in the late 90s. Are we really any safer now than we were then? AML/KYC is not just about terrorism (where it's doubtful if these measures actually have much effect, given how much terrorism is state-sponsored or -backed), it's more about organized crime - and I'd say that yes, organizations like the OG Italian mafia have a way harder time these days. Particularly Italy has made a lot of progress combatting them.
- from 4y ago
  The major organized crime cases of the 70s and 80s were built almost entirely off wiretaps, informants, and a then novel law called RICO which federalized a bunch of former state crimes notably loansharking and gambling and dramatically increased the sentences for those convicted of those crimes. This resulted in dwindling membership and combined with changing demographics is why most mobsters in America are 70-80 years old today. If anything Italy proves how ineffective these laws are. Every couple of months they announce a 100 million euro Ndrangheta/Camorra related seizure and yet these groups still have thousands of members, still traffic drugs by the ton, and still extort half the businesses in the South.
hnbad 4y ago
The consensus is that there is a profound difference between slipping someone a dollar bill and slipping them coffers full of cash. We don't need to know where that dollar bill goes, most likely. We do need to know where those coffers went. Scale matters. Quantitative changes are qualitative changes. Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful. The difference between communications and finance is that finance is integral to the state. Currency and taxes are a core instrument of the state (even its capability for direct physical violence requires finance to maintain and exert). Even so, privacy only applies to SOME forms of communication just as it still applies to SOME forms of finance (though for the latter this is more often de facto than de jure). If you want true communications privacy, you need to build parallel systems that don't interact with public or compromised ones and even then there's the risk of someone taking information from one system to another and leaking it (this is why OPSEC/INFOSEC/COMSEC is such a big deal).
- from 4y ago
  > Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful. Yes but there should be a cost-benefit analysis. The current system of low reporting thresholds across the board and filing SARs on anything that moves does not produce actionable intelligence 95% of the time. No one is against BSA recordkeeping requirements for instance. I am against a system that treats everyone as guilty until proven innocent (thousands of people have had Paypal or Coinbase decide to freeze their funds indefinitely for "compliance reasons") and incentivizes "derisking" left and right. See https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/account-closed-how-bank-de-risking-hurts-legitimate-customers-1439419093 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/account-closed-how-bank-de-... (or https://archive.ph/D3amw https://archive.ph/D3amw). UBO laws are a great example of poor cost-benefit analysis. Actual criminals will just get stolen identities or homeless people to put down as owners while the 99.9% of law abiding people have millions of unnecessary added compliance hours every year.
mcphage 4y ago
> there is a consensus on this site that communications privacy is a human right but that financial privacy is a terrible evil Money can be transferred; speech can't be transferred. That's a significant enough difference to them that "why is privacy for one good but privacy for the other bad?" seems like a facile comparison.

by from 4y ago

nrb 4y ago

I have to believe the motivation is much more likely placed with the treasury having the most complete view of everyone’s finances, seeing as basically every dollar earned in the US was done so on the shoulders of tax revenue-directed infrastructure, projects, research, and defense apparatus. Something like this going mainstream would require us to completely reform the way the country collects revenue and might even affect our access to debt, so (in their eyes) why not just stomp out the promising ones with whatever justification is easiest?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> the treasury having the most complete view of everyone’s finances, seeing as basically every dollar earned in the US Have you followed a financial-crimes investigation? Nobody knows where jack is. The American payment system is essentially decentralized [1]. Each bank maintains its own books and records and periodically compares parts of them with others and a summary with the central bank to promote consistency. The IRS and Treasury don't systematically share records. (Bureaucratic imperatives, after all.) That's why when the FBI or the CIA or whomever want financial records they have to quietly subpoena banks. To assemble records they do not have. > this going mainstream would require us to completely reform the way the country collects revenue and might even affect our access to debt Wall Street has enthusiastically embraced crypto. It's cheaper to run, permits higher fee loading and is regulatory greenspace, which tends to favor sharks. Nothing about crypto makes taxes or debt impossible. Taxes were collected and debt raised for the millennia when cash and commodity money reigned. Crypto is easier to track than either of those. [1] Aside: the difference between crypto and traditional rails isn't decentralization. It's eager evaluation. The blockchain is always current everywhere. Bank records are not. The latter is computationally cheaper, but at the cost of more error. Centralized banking would involve everyone having an account at the Fed. It has been suggested [a]. [a] https://econreview.berkeley.edu/fed-accounts-and-the-right-to-save/ https://econreview.berkeley.edu/fed-accounts-and-the-right-t...
from 4y ago
I am skeptical of this because if they just wanted to raise revenue at the expense of privacy there are a lot easier ways to do it. They could make FBAR apply domestically. Or just require banks report checks and wires over 50k. Banning Tornado Cash is a kind of decision made by self styled counterproliferation/illicit finance/terror finance/anti corruption "experts."
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > require banks report checks and wires over 50k There is no reporting requirement, but a record-keeping one [1]. [1] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/bsa_quickrefguide.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/bsa_quickr...
  - from 4y ago
    Yes but this is really only useful for them after they already discovered a target of investigation. Having this information for everyone would make the initial detection of tax evaders substantially easier.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > this information for everyone would make the initial detection of tax evaders substantially easier The IRS and FinCEN don’t systematically share information. (Ironically, the IRS is more restricted in this respect [1].) [1] https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-026-008 https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-026-008

ETH_start 4y ago

Money has been massively stigmatized, because that is a prerequisite for centralizing control over economic interaction. The beneficiaries of this centralized control are any one who depends on government spending or regulatory restrictions for their job, it's your parents and neighbours, your partner and cousin. This is a massive cohort - who are over-represented in the top 10% of income earners [1] - who participate in the manufacturing of consent for restrictions on our right to engage in mutually voluntary economic interactions with other consenting adults. [1] https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-workers-earn-143000-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...

dan-robertson 4y ago

1. I would not call it consensus, for example the top comment on this article disagrees with that ‘consensus’ 2. Here are two nuanced arguments about each that I’ve seen: Communications privacy is good in the small and mirrors the world with earlier technology with some differences. In the large it can allow maintaining much larger conspiracies than were previously possible with private meetings. One may consider it acceptable from a privacy and free speech perspective to allow secret communication in small groups but less secret communication in large groups. Indeed for political speech in a modern democracy you generally want it in public anyway, and WhatsApp and signal have small group sizes so you get this anyway. For very large groups, leaks seem hard to avoid. A counter argument might be that militaries / companies are in some sense like conspiracies in the way they want to keep state/trade secrets. However in typical democracies there may be document release schedules/transparency laws and internal company information may be revealed through patents, subpoenas, or just plain old leaks. The money argument is that whereas people typically have similar amounts of private speech, some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others. Privacy for communication is then reasonably fairly distributed across the population (though those with more to hide may gain more) whereas privacy for money is mostly an advantage for the people with lots of it. Giving the people who are already rich and powerful this kind of advantage in avoiding scrutiny/taxes may not be considered fair or desirable. A counter argument could be that it is unfair for the rich to be exposed to such increased scrutiny merely because of their money.

igorkraw 4y ago
> A counter argument could be that it is unfair for the rich to be exposed to such increased scrutiny merely because of their money I think it is very fine to discriminate against people based in things that give them enormous power, quality if life and they can easily get rid of. Unlike being discriminated and scrutinized for having no money , you can easily escape scrutiny due to wealth by giving away wealth with no meaningful reduction of quality of life (after a given point)
- terryf 4y ago
  Really? You think there is an ending to a sentence that starts with: "I think it is very fine to discriminate against people based in.." That's actually good?

bb88 4y ago

You typically can't trade speech for guns, sex slaves, child porn, drugs, etc.

ETH_start 4y ago
Of course not speech is not money but the relationship is that both can be used to facilitate crime, yet only with respect to money is this fact to rationalize the criminalization of privacy.

credit_guy 4y ago

> financial privacy I consider myself entitled to have my Amazon purchases private. Guess what? They are. I don't need a blockchain for that.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
They’re only private until Amazon has a leak or decides to sell it to the highest bidder.
welshwelsh 4y ago
What happens when something you want to buy becomes illegal? Imagine if your government banned weed or abortion pills or porn. Or if your country gets taken over by a dictator and you want to fund the opposition
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Yes, black markets have never existed and can only be done through the existence of cryptocurrency. That or you find a plug for your weed (like half of Europe does), abortion pills (like half of the US is about to do) or porn, and you pay with old fashioned cash. I know, not having one click order of your weed is horribly harsh.
cowtools 4y ago
private to whom? ridiculous statement.
jvdizzle 4y ago
If you think of consumer purchases when you think of financial privacy, you live in a bubble of privilege. There are literally countries where people get sent to jail for giving money to pro-democracy groups or journalists. If you're an American, imagine a scenario where rights are stripped away from people at the federal level and donating to those causes becomes illegal. Surveillance has impacts far beyond your consumerist lifestyle.

nnx 4y ago

AML is the least effective policy of all times. Infinite cost for practically zero results. 0.2% success rate while it increase costs for everyone and, worse, severely limits economic opportunity for many people in unprivileged industries/countries. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.17...

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> 0.2% success rate This is the "proportion of criminal funds recovered" [1]. So of the $1.6 trillion laundered out of $2.1 trillion of estimated criminal proceeds, only a few billion were confiscated or seized. The author then argues for reducing fines on banks and financial institutions, increasing criminal asset forfeiture regimes and moving away from suspicious transaction reporting. (I agree with Nos. 2 and 3; for No. 1, I'm skeptical given the author is a consultant [2].) Tornado's sanctions were imposed by OFAC. From what we can tell, it wasn't AML reporting but criminal investigations that yielded the tip. Your source thus refutes your argument. Following the author's prescription, we'd now work to investigate everyone around Tornado and seize their assets if they're doing anything illegal. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25741292.2020.17... page 82 [2] https://www.amlassurance.com/better-outcomes.html https://www.amlassurance.com/better-outcomes.html
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>criminal asset forfeiture regimes Criminal asset forfeiture is not civil asset forfeiture. You need to actually prove someone committed a crime that generated the assets, in order to seize them, and the burden of proof is that of criminal law: beyond reasonable doubt, which is much higher than the preponderance of evidence standard of civil law. >>Following the author's prescription, we'd now work to investigate everyone around Tornado and seize their assets if they're doing anything illegal. The author didn't suggest investigating any one who privately transacts, but in any case, what you describe would be far more just than the current situation, where all Americans are having their right to use TC denied, under the pain of sanctions law, as a roundabout way of punishing North Korea.

wilde 4y ago

Why are you looking for principles when most reactions are driven by emotion? Many of crypto’s loudest representatives are smug assholes. People love seeing arrogant folks taken down a peg (deservedly or no).

fezfight 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Consultant32452 4y ago

What if I told you they never believed they would be successful when they told you they just needed to close the loopholes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Nursie 4y ago

> It seems strange to me that there is a consensus on this site that communications privacy is a human right but that financial privacy is a terrible evil Why is that strange? Financial 'privacy' allows corporate interests to buy government officials or just buy governments, it allows despots and oligarchs to move money with impunity, allows dictators to steal mercilessly from their people and 'clean' the money in other nations. And yes, it allows terrorists, drug dealers and criminals to go about their business too. These are not identical concerns to privacy of speech. To paint them as such seems overly reductive. > Are we really any safer now than we were then? We are certainly better able to fight corruption and laundering of dirty money in the west than we have been in the past, yes. Are we 'safer'? Who knows, but it's about a lot more than a bit of cocaine, it's about the integrity of democracy itself.

leppr 4y ago
> it's about the integrity of democracy itself. Oh please, this has nothing to do with Democracy. Democracy literally means citizen-power, while this enforcement is removing the power of citizens to come to consensus on which money they want to use. The day there's a fair election at the federal level on any core economy-related topic, then your argument could begin to have something to stand on, but right now it doesn't. This is strictly shifting power away from citizen into the hands of a few.
- Nursie 4y ago
  No, this isn't removing some imaginary consensus process on money, it's sanctioning a criminal money-laundering operation using well established law. > The day there's a fair election at the federal level on any core economy-related topic, then your argument could begin to have something to stand on, but right now it doesn't. Just because your system is already broken doesn't mean it's a good plan to enable it to be outright bought. > This is strictly shifting power away from citizen into the hands of a few. Bullshit. That is exactly what so-called financial privacy does. "The many" are not incentivised to hide their financial movements because they are uninteresting. "The many" are not using ethereum-based money laundering tools, nor will they. Cryptocurrency in general is already a niche activity of techbros and crimininals. The very, very few.

throwaway-jim 4y ago

I've seen people loose 40% laundering gift cards.

mschuster91 4y ago

> The truth is that these now-sacred laws that ended financial privacy really only started being enforced in America in the 80s and their European equivalents in the late 90s. Are we really any safer now than we were then? AML/KYC is not just about terrorism (where it's doubtful if these measures actually have much effect, given how much terrorism is state-sponsored or -backed), it's more about organized crime - and I'd say that yes, organizations like the OG Italian mafia have a way harder time these days. Particularly Italy has made a lot of progress combatting them.

from 4y ago
The major organized crime cases of the 70s and 80s were built almost entirely off wiretaps, informants, and a then novel law called RICO which federalized a bunch of former state crimes notably loansharking and gambling and dramatically increased the sentences for those convicted of those crimes. This resulted in dwindling membership and combined with changing demographics is why most mobsters in America are 70-80 years old today. If anything Italy proves how ineffective these laws are. Every couple of months they announce a 100 million euro Ndrangheta/Camorra related seizure and yet these groups still have thousands of members, still traffic drugs by the ton, and still extort half the businesses in the South.

hnbad 4y ago

The consensus is that there is a profound difference between slipping someone a dollar bill and slipping them coffers full of cash. We don't need to know where that dollar bill goes, most likely. We do need to know where those coffers went. Scale matters. Quantitative changes are qualitative changes. Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful. The difference between communications and finance is that finance is integral to the state. Currency and taxes are a core instrument of the state (even its capability for direct physical violence requires finance to maintain and exert). Even so, privacy only applies to SOME forms of communication just as it still applies to SOME forms of finance (though for the latter this is more often de facto than de jure). If you want true communications privacy, you need to build parallel systems that don't interact with public or compromised ones and even then there's the risk of someone taking information from one system to another and leaking it (this is why OPSEC/INFOSEC/COMSEC is such a big deal).

from 4y ago
> Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful. Yes but there should be a cost-benefit analysis. The current system of low reporting thresholds across the board and filing SARs on anything that moves does not produce actionable intelligence 95% of the time. No one is against BSA recordkeeping requirements for instance. I am against a system that treats everyone as guilty until proven innocent (thousands of people have had Paypal or Coinbase decide to freeze their funds indefinitely for "compliance reasons") and incentivizes "derisking" left and right. See https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/account-closed-how-bank-de-risking-hurts-legitimate-customers-1439419093 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/account-closed-how-bank-de-... (or https://archive.ph/D3amw https://archive.ph/D3amw). UBO laws are a great example of poor cost-benefit analysis. Actual criminals will just get stolen identities or homeless people to put down as owners while the 99.9% of law abiding people have millions of unnecessary added compliance hours every year.

mcphage 4y ago

> there is a consensus on this site that communications privacy is a human right but that financial privacy is a terrible evil Money can be transferred; speech can't be transferred. That's a significant enough difference to them that "why is privacy for one good but privacy for the other bad?" seems like a facile comparison.