> A shocking idea would be to prosecute the source of the ill gotten gains, or the underlying crime, rather than imposing these AML externalities on other actor

> A shocking idea would be to prosecute the source of the ill gotten gains, or the underlying crime, rather than imposing these AML externalities on other actors. Of course. But there's 2 big problems with that from a government's perspective. 1) Prosecuting actual criminals would require hard work: real investigation without having an automatic sneak peak into everybody's finances is hard. 2) This wouldn't give the government any extra power.