[tzumby]

I love Lawfare and listen to their podcast quite often, but the argument presented is so odd: 1) specifically calling for not introducing new legislation to deal with this and 2) trying to fit mining into a bucket of legislation designed to kill it. This is not in good faith at all.

Money laundering is despicable, specially when it happens at high level. And we have to admit that Bitcoin, ZCash, Ethereum (Tornado Cash) and other cryptocurrencies are facilitating that. But we're getting better at tracking that. After all, transactions are all public and once you can label one wallet address, you can perform all sorts of graph analysis and learn a lot. Contrast that with trying to subpoena banks to follow money trails.

The other aspect of this is that, like it or not, banks are not playing by the rules all the time. See HSBC laundering almost 1 billion for Mexican and Colombian cartels. See Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank enabling former Ukraine's president to steal money with offshore accounts (https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/former-ukrainian-pre...)

We should absolutely deal with this, but the first place to start is the Bank -> Cryptocurrency (and vice versa) transfers, or as they call them, the fiat gateways. You still can't pay for stuff with cryptocurrencies so ultimately, whoever steals or launders using cryptocurrencies, will need to eventually convert back into fiat money.

Edit: correct typo in first paragraph

[Diggsey]

> This is not in good faith at all.

What do you mean? The article is arguing that crypto-currencies (as they are run today) are illegal under existing laws, therefore we don't need new laws.

Regardless of whether this is true or not, how is this a "bad faith" argument?

It sounds like you just didn't like the conclusion but couldn't find anything actually wrong with the logic...

[tzumby]

I explained why I think this is argued in bad faith: trying to frame mining in a law framework for the single purpose of killing it vs something like: "ok, this is bad, let's try to fix it. here's how we can fix it"

[Diggsey]

If the author believes it to be illegal, why should they care about "fixing it"?

Murderer: <kills a person with a hammer>

You: Let's introduce a new law to make killing people with hammers illegal.

Author: We don't need to introduce a new law, murder is already a crime.

You: That's a bad faith argument, because it means we can't kill people with any kind of implement, not just hammers!

There are two ways you can argue this:

1) Either you believe that the crime should not be illegal.

2) Or you disagree that the act falls under the definition of this crime.

In neither case is the author acting in bad faith, they're just disagreeing with you. It sounds like you would argue (2) but in that case you should provide some reasoning for that.

[haolez]

Money laundering is "despicable"? That's quite a strong sentiment for a white collar crime which basically states that money not tracked by the government is illegal.

[Diggsey]

> states that money not tracked by the government is illegal.

And forgery laws state that you can't draw whatever you want on pieces of paper.

What a law states has nothing to do with its importance.

Many other laws (involving crimes that are very far from "white collar") are extremely difficult to enforce without the ability to trace money.

Money laundering is a crime because it enables other more serious crimes, not because of the act itself.

[haolez]

Cash enables crimes. Guns. What about cars? I don't agree with this argument, but then again, I'm talking more in a philosophical way than a practical one.

[tzumby]

Here are a few reasons why I called it despicable:

- Laundering money in poor countries directly hurt the citizens of those countries because the government doesn't collect the taxes it is entitled to

- Most of the money to be laundered comes from illicit activities: drugs, prostitution, human trafficking. I don't have any citations here for proportions, sorry.

Update: fix formatting

[988747]

> Laundering money in poor countries directly hurt the citizens of those countries because the government doesn't collect the taxes it is entitled to

Minior nitpick: Poor countries typically have authoritarian, corrupt governments, so keeping money out of their hands is actually a good thing :)

But more to the point: the whole idea of money laundering is that criminals WANT and DO pay taxes on their illegal income by pretending it came from legal sources. If they just kept those money under the mattress they would never pay a penny of taxes, but they also wouldn't be able to actually spend the money. So, money laundering in poor countries actually increases the tax income of their governments.

[omegaworks]

>Poor countries typically have authoritarian, corrupt governments

The western national media has been effective at propagandizing you toward this end. The "typical poor country is corrupt" trope is circulated widely and is used to discredit any attempt at wresting control over a country's fiscal future away from a cohort of wealthy western nations.

Corruption in the west is normalized and simply labeled "lobbying." "Corruption" elsewhere is used as an excuse to overturn elections, topple governments and assassinate leaders.

[haolez]

I live in a poor country and the parent's comment is on spot, in my opinion.

[meowface]

> After all, transactions are all public and once you can label one wallet address, you can perform all sorts of graph analysis and learn a lot.

This is true for most cryptocurrencies, but not Monero.

[matthewdgreen]

>And we have to admit that Bitcoin, ZCash, Ethereum (Tornado Cash) and other cryptocurrencies are facilitating that. ... After all, transactions are all public and once you can label one wallet address, you can perform all sorts of graph analysis and learn a lot. Contrast that with trying to subpoena banks to follow money trails.

The mainstream banking system has built up an infrastructure of laws and procedures designed to guarantee transaction and identity confidentiality (e.g., laws alone: RFPA, GLBA, FCRA, GDPR and many more.) These privacy protections aren't some quaint byproduct of another era, they're requirements for any working financial system. You can't have your private banking data oozing out all over the world: this is terrible for business and fundamentally unsafe for users. It's unsustainable in the cryptocurrency sphere as well, but crypto is mostly a toy that nobody uses for real applications so these weaknesses aren't a killer -- yet.

The traditional banking system squares the need for privacy and desire for AML by placing confidential banking data into closed systems which share it with law enforcement upon presentation of a subpeona. Most cryptocurrencies deal with it by, basically, YOLO. But none of that is sustainable.

Worse, it hurts the good guys and hides the bad ones. Traceable blockchains put you into a regime where the clever launderers will find ways to obfuscate their transactions, and everyone else ends up with an unusable system that dumps their business secrets into the hands of any competitor who can write a check to a tracing company.

(Full disclosure: Zcash scientist here. But we created the tech for a reason, and fear of a broken 'panopticon' banking system was a big part of that.)