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>> Non-criminal money would be a minuscule percentage of the total because, the same way you use to change $500 for the lulz would be used in an organized way t

>> Non-criminal money would be a minuscule percentage of the total because, the same way you use to change $500 for the lulz would be used in an organized way to move millions extracted with violence and theft by Russian government and other criminals. I want to respond to this point because it is a key difference between the societies governed by oligarchy (extremely rich criminals, no middle class, 99% poor) versus those that still have a middle class. You are right that in Russia, $500 for lulz is nothing compared to the money flows of the criminals. It is commonly assumed by most Russians I know that the American and European world also operates on this principle, and that law enforcement here simply does what the money tells them to do. This is actually not true, at least not close to the extent that it is true in gangster-run countries. Law enforcement in America and Europe does what the middle class wants them to do. This means that they do interdict extremely wealthy criminals from time to time, and ultimately our society is not governed by them. In any case, the largest flows of money in Europe and America are legitimate business flows; things like cocaine and prostitution, organized crime are miniscule compared to the profits of legal drug companies - whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas.

runnerup 4y ago
> whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas. The top 10% of Americans own 90% of the shares. If by middle class you mean “above the labor class, below the ruling class”, then I … still dont agree because the 0.1% ruling class still own a disproportionately huge % of those shares! Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor who have no wealth and own no shares. Bill Gates owns 7% of all USA farmland but I wouldn’t call him a farmer.
- floor2 4y ago
  > Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different people online. I wonder how much misunderstanding this causes. I'm guessing your background is urban and coastal? I'd love it if you'd share, I'm genuinely curious. I would never use the word "farmer" if I was talking about an immigrant laborer picking fruit or whatever. I'd call them migrant laborers or pickers or farm workers. In the standard dialect of people in the 90% of America designated "flyover country", they'd would use the word "farmer" to mean the people who own and operate farms. Generally a middle-class, small-business-owner type person. Likely educated in some mixture of agriculture, business, finance, real estate. They're highly financially savvy, as they have to manage selling futures vs taking the spot price for their crops balanced against storage costs, land rental agreements, machinery leases or repairs, tax and crop insurance complexities, not to mention the science of how to optimize yield on their specific land. Calling the laborers "farmers" is like calling an uber driver a tech worker, at least in the dialect of English I speak.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    I’m from the northern midwest (Michigan/Ohio) and Texas. We call people who do the farming “farmers” and the people who own the farms “farm owners”. We acknowledge that a lot of even the white families who live on the farm that they farm no longer own their farms. They’re still “farmers” to us even though they don’t own their farmland. In Texas we also have “Ranch Owner” vs. “Ranchero”. One of them has bullshit stuck on the outside of their boots, the other has the bullshit inside their boots. My wife has some Indian-American friends who invest in farmland and laugh at the idea that they have “white sharecroppers”. It would be weird to call them farmers, but not call their “white sharecroppers” farmers.
    - floor2 4y ago
      I think your statement "We call people who do the farming 'farmers'" is accurate to my usage as well, perhaps with then some nuance to what work is "farming". I didn't mean to imply that land ownership was central. But maybe "operating the business of a farm" is farming/being a farmer, whereas "doing labor on a farm" is not. For instance, if person A owns 100 acres of farm land, person B rents that land and makes the decisions about what to plant, when to plant, when to harvest, how to manage the transportation and sale of the product, etc and person C is hired by B to do some work on that farm, I'd probably only call person B a farmer.
throwaway290 4y ago
I am not talking about intra country flows though but specifically kleptocrats laundering dark money in the west.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Right, but what I am saying is that all the money laundering from oligarchs and drug lords is only a tiny fraction of the US economy. Enacting draconian controls on crypto or cash or any other harder-to-trace transaction, for the stated purpose of curtailing dark money, ends up being another form of taxation on the middle and lower classes. The ultra wealthy criminals will always find another way to launder their gains. Unpredictable side effects of removing cash include enormous housing bubbles caused by laundering through real estate, and stock bubbles... and these just serve as another transfer of wealth to the rich.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > money laundering from oligarchs and drug lords is only a tiny fraction of the US economy. You can't have any way of knowing how much money in crypto is dark. And of course economies of some of those dictatorships are smaller than some US companies, but if you are telling us that it doesn't matter if putin and friends can launder money through crypto to maintain power, kill more people and make us suffer while buying cozy life for themselves because that amount of money is not that large in the grand scale of US economy then good for you, I have nothing else to say.
    - subsistence234 4y ago
      >Money laundering They don't need bitcoin for that. Smuggling money into the US (the by far largest global destination for laundered money) via crypto requires the exact same amount of criminal effort (false identities, mules,..) as smuggling money through regular bank transfers, because nowadays all crypto exchanges that are allowed to interact with US banks must establish the identity of their customers same as a regular bank. So that leaves P2P trades. Their volume can be estimated (in fact: upper bounded, by adding all trades on the block chain and subtracting those corresponding to trades on known centralized exchanges.) It's about $200B per year. As for money laundering, the range of estimates of global volume per year is pretty wide, ranging from $20B to $5T. If you compare research from the 90s and today, you'll notice that the estimates have not changed, meaning: similar methodology applied to current data will yield estimates that are close to the estimates from the 1990s, adjusted for inflation. If the low end estimates are true, then money laundering is not a serious problem and using it as pretext for destroying civil rights is a joke, so let's go with the UN's reasonably big estimate: $800 billion - $2 trillion. In that case, even if *ALL* P2P bitcoin trades were criminal, they would still only amount to 10%-20% of global money laundering. Finally: The total BTC market cap is ~$400B, half of that has not been traded since 2015. Given the risk affinity of career criminal and the inherent volatility of criminal enterprise and given the historical rise of BTC, don't you think at least 10% of mone launderers would keep at least 10% of their money laundering transactions as crypto instead of cashing all of it out into USD? But they wouldn't keep them on exchanges. Looking at the blockchain data, it's difficult to make that work *UNLESS* only a small amount (less than $100B) money laundering happens via crypto.

runnerup 4y ago

> whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas. The top 10% of Americans own 90% of the shares. If by middle class you mean “above the labor class, below the ruling class”, then I … still dont agree because the 0.1% ruling class still own a disproportionately huge % of those shares! Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor who have no wealth and own no shares. Bill Gates owns 7% of all USA farmland but I wouldn’t call him a farmer.

floor2 4y ago
> Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different people online. I wonder how much misunderstanding this causes. I'm guessing your background is urban and coastal? I'd love it if you'd share, I'm genuinely curious. I would never use the word "farmer" if I was talking about an immigrant laborer picking fruit or whatever. I'd call them migrant laborers or pickers or farm workers. In the standard dialect of people in the 90% of America designated "flyover country", they'd would use the word "farmer" to mean the people who own and operate farms. Generally a middle-class, small-business-owner type person. Likely educated in some mixture of agriculture, business, finance, real estate. They're highly financially savvy, as they have to manage selling futures vs taking the spot price for their crops balanced against storage costs, land rental agreements, machinery leases or repairs, tax and crop insurance complexities, not to mention the science of how to optimize yield on their specific land. Calling the laborers "farmers" is like calling an uber driver a tech worker, at least in the dialect of English I speak.
- runnerup 4y ago
  I’m from the northern midwest (Michigan/Ohio) and Texas. We call people who do the farming “farmers” and the people who own the farms “farm owners”. We acknowledge that a lot of even the white families who live on the farm that they farm no longer own their farms. They’re still “farmers” to us even though they don’t own their farmland. In Texas we also have “Ranch Owner” vs. “Ranchero”. One of them has bullshit stuck on the outside of their boots, the other has the bullshit inside their boots. My wife has some Indian-American friends who invest in farmland and laugh at the idea that they have “white sharecroppers”. It would be weird to call them farmers, but not call their “white sharecroppers” farmers.
  - floor2 4y ago
    I think your statement "We call people who do the farming 'farmers'" is accurate to my usage as well, perhaps with then some nuance to what work is "farming". I didn't mean to imply that land ownership was central. But maybe "operating the business of a farm" is farming/being a farmer, whereas "doing labor on a farm" is not. For instance, if person A owns 100 acres of farm land, person B rents that land and makes the decisions about what to plant, when to plant, when to harvest, how to manage the transportation and sale of the product, etc and person C is hired by B to do some work on that farm, I'd probably only call person B a farmer.

throwaway290 4y ago

I am not talking about intra country flows though but specifically kleptocrats laundering dark money in the west.

noduerme 4y ago
Right, but what I am saying is that all the money laundering from oligarchs and drug lords is only a tiny fraction of the US economy. Enacting draconian controls on crypto or cash or any other harder-to-trace transaction, for the stated purpose of curtailing dark money, ends up being another form of taxation on the middle and lower classes. The ultra wealthy criminals will always find another way to launder their gains. Unpredictable side effects of removing cash include enormous housing bubbles caused by laundering through real estate, and stock bubbles... and these just serve as another transfer of wealth to the rich.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  > money laundering from oligarchs and drug lords is only a tiny fraction of the US economy. You can't have any way of knowing how much money in crypto is dark. And of course economies of some of those dictatorships are smaller than some US companies, but if you are telling us that it doesn't matter if putin and friends can launder money through crypto to maintain power, kill more people and make us suffer while buying cozy life for themselves because that amount of money is not that large in the grand scale of US economy then good for you, I have nothing else to say.
  - subsistence234 4y ago
    >Money laundering They don't need bitcoin for that. Smuggling money into the US (the by far largest global destination for laundered money) via crypto requires the exact same amount of criminal effort (false identities, mules,..) as smuggling money through regular bank transfers, because nowadays all crypto exchanges that are allowed to interact with US banks must establish the identity of their customers same as a regular bank. So that leaves P2P trades. Their volume can be estimated (in fact: upper bounded, by adding all trades on the block chain and subtracting those corresponding to trades on known centralized exchanges.) It's about $200B per year. As for money laundering, the range of estimates of global volume per year is pretty wide, ranging from $20B to $5T. If you compare research from the 90s and today, you'll notice that the estimates have not changed, meaning: similar methodology applied to current data will yield estimates that are close to the estimates from the 1990s, adjusted for inflation. If the low end estimates are true, then money laundering is not a serious problem and using it as pretext for destroying civil rights is a joke, so let's go with the UN's reasonably big estimate: $800 billion - $2 trillion. In that case, even if *ALL* P2P bitcoin trades were criminal, they would still only amount to 10%-20% of global money laundering. Finally: The total BTC market cap is ~$400B, half of that has not been traded since 2015. Given the risk affinity of career criminal and the inherent volatility of criminal enterprise and given the historical rise of BTC, don't you think at least 10% of mone launderers would keep at least 10% of their money laundering transactions as crypto instead of cashing all of it out into USD? But they wouldn't keep them on exchanges. Looking at the blockchain data, it's difficult to make that work *UNLESS* only a small amount (less than $100B) money laundering happens via crypto.