[toolz]

A company that specializes in helping people escape from horrible rulers would be an example. Not everything deserves to be public. There are always as many good reasons to hide as there are entities that need to be hidden from.

[newsclues]

If a company that specializes in upsetting “rulers” their security shouldn’t be security through obscurity and it would be harder to trust than Former Spec Op Dudes Name Incorporated

Because if you insist on privacy for the “helping people escape rulers” business the money laundering and criminals will suddenly be in that building!

[toolz]

Criminals and launderers have never and will likely never need to incorporate. Sure, it's a tool they might use, but at best you'd take some of their margins away from them. Doesn't seem like a great trade to me, stealing some of the criminals profits in exchange for exposing the people who need privacy.

[BLKNSLVR]

Launderers are always incorporated. If they weren't, they wouldn't be able to launder.

[toolz]

that's not true, you can launder money many ways without incorporating or even using a company...just one example would be paying cash for used vehicles and reselling them...or buying crypto mining hardware - that's just off the top of my head as someone with zero experience laundering. I have to imagine the pros are better at coming up with ways than I am...

[BLKNSLVR]

Not disagreeing with your point, but I would think (personal opinion, so feel free to entirely discard) that there are scales of laundering, and the top end of the scale, where governments should be focusing most energy/worry, couldn't be achieved on a 'personal' basis - although potentially on the mutli-personal basis, but I'd also think that would introduce risk if each person is able to be linked.

Happy to be proven wrong though, and to hear counter-anecdotes (I find it incredibly interesting). Systems and loopholes and patches and 'bugs'.

[toolz]

Well, at the highest scales they launder in plain sight with completely de-anonymized banks and the banks get a slap on the wrist. So that might be considered a different category of problem all together.

[ericd]

As always, obscurity is one (often very helpful) layer of a multilayered defensive strategy. The meme that it's useless needs to go away. If you have a safe at home, you should probably hide its existence, because even if power tools couldn't reliably crack a safe (they can), there's always the $5 wrench strategy.