[kragen]

Another day, another answer to "what is Bitcoin good for?"

Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is?

The article does admit this:

> It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong.

Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?

The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%.

So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.

Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671

[sofixa]

> Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?

No, but extra due diligence is required when someone convicted of taking bribes or similar corruption or drug/human trafficking record opens a bank account with huge sums of money.

Or people like those:

* former head of intelligence and vice president of Egypt https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...

* https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en... former wife of the current Kazakh dictator

Just to name a few. Their money is quite probably of dubious origin and the bank should have done better due diligence.

[kragen]

There's nothing in the article to suggest that they didn't do the due diligence; do you have access to some information about that that isn't in the article?

[sofixa]

The whole article is about Credit Suisse's lack of due diligence, and the reason why the whistleblower blew the whistle. I find it impossible to believe that the former wife of an extremely corrupt politician in a kleptocracy just stumbled upon one million CHF in a casino.

[kragen]

That's what makes it so telling that the article contains no information whatsoever about what due diligence was or wasn't done and, with the exception of the unnamed cardinal, no suggestion that the accounts were used for any wrongdoing.

As for Nadezhda Tokayeva, who I think is who you are talking about, how much money do you think she should have? For 40 years she was married to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the most powerful man in Kazakhstan. Her maximum balance was 1.5 million CHF, barely enough to buy a house in San Francisco. That amounts to a savings rate of 40,000 CHF per year during that time, or 80,000 CHF per year during the 21 years after he first became Prime Minister. That hardly screams "looting the country"; even the president of the US gets paid several times that much officially, without even taking into account speaking engagements and the like.

Kazakhstan is indeed very corrupt, but what do you want banks to do about it? Refuse to service any Kazakh customers? Only service Kazakh customers who operate private businesses rather than working for the government—on the dubious theory that private Kazakh businesses are not corrupt?

This just sounds way too much like "you don't look like the kind of person who deserves that much money" to me.

[Youden]

> So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.

But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.

[kragen]

Transactions, yes, and dates and amounts, but not names. And many "transactions" on the blockchain are within a single wallet.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when journalists start reporting on the immense data in the blockchain, but for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet. I don't think it'll happen as long as the "journalists" are the kind that think it's okay to publish an encryption key to a publicly available encrypted file of confidential data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...

[tootie]

This times 1000 if you have done things wrong and don't want journalists (or law enforcement) to find out

[kragen]

Or if you've done things right that you don't want law enforcement to find out about, such as funding a protest.

But this is all hypothetical; evidently only one of the 30,000 people swept up in this dragnet had done anything with their account that would merit such attention: the single example of the (oddly, unnamed) cardinal with his possibly fraudulent London real estate transaction.