[olalonde]

> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely.

Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimated 1.7 billion worldwide) and don't actually stop criminals. There's a serious case to be made for putting an end to that war and diverting those resources to old school crime fighting.

https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-...

[spacebanana7]

In the UK, spending by financial services firms on AML compliance [1] exceeds all police spending [2] (£28.7 Bn vs £21.47Bn).

This represents a massive misallocation of resources. Public safety would almost certainly be improved if we doubled police spending by slashing AML burdens by 2/3rds.

Unfortunately it's hard for politicians address crime by raising taxes to fund real police but easy for them to attempt to address crime by increasing AML regulation, even if the latter is barely effective.

[1] https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/cutting-the-costs-o... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/298637/united-kingdom-uk...

[Seriomino]

Trustworthy source you have: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates."

I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care.

And crypto is not providing any solution to this at all. So why not fixing that issue inside the crypto bro fan club first and than trying to replace our current fiat with it?

[olalonde]

> I'm totally against money laundering. It takes the money away from us people for streets, school and healthy care.

I think you're confusing money laundering and tax evasion.

[cdiddy2]

Alternative source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...