3 ms·

What makes NFTs any more effective at money laundering than cryptocurrency?

• DebtDeflation 4y ago
  You can sell them to yourself (at arm's length, using separate entities) to establish a price, and then sell them to yourself again (using a different entity) to take the profit and launder the money. Crypto may be manipulated, but you can't just set an arbitrary price equal to the amount of money you need to launder.
• michaelt 4y ago
  Hypothetically? If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from. On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.
  • mikhael28 4y ago
    This was a great explanation.
• SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  The price is more flexible. Any given coin pair is worth a certain exchange rate at a certain time, and an investigating entity could analyse historic coin prices, compare to the amounts exchanged as recorded on the blockchain, and deduce the actual value gained or lost. With NFTs, each one is valued independently and the price is what you and someone-who-definitely-isn't-you-wink-wink traded it for most recently.