This is a heavily editorialized and misleading submission title. The only thing on this page that could be construed to have anything to do with the submission title is that this organization appears to be lobbying the EU not to make self-hosted wallets (where you control your own keys) illegal.
The concerning aspect is 1 of 6 objectives so it’s no minor goal. The transmission to self-hosted anonymous wallets is what makes crypto so effective for fraud, sanction evasion, money laundering and other crimes. It clearly fails FATF Recommendation 16 and virtually all KYC standards. Seeing Coinbase and a German exchange support such an objective is rather unexpected.
Analogous situation to self-hosted communication encryption keys, where criminals can host military-grade encryption keys on any common mobile device, allowing them to discuss child porn and terrorism in a way that the police cannot monitor
If you are OK with child abuse, unfettered corruption, sex and weapons trafficking or scammers stealing your parents savings and generally like to wonder constantly if the next terrorist bomb or cyber attack happens close to you. Then there really is no need for such things as AML/CTF controls. That isn’t saying AML/CTF stops all crime but it’s making it more expensive and less criminal activity happens.
You are not alone with your view, in a sense Meta, Google and AWS as well as most social media platform act like they don’t think they need to have such controls. They just provide the platform.
By that logic AML/CTF controls would need to stop for banks and all others. Processing a payment for murder would become OK. Even though the killing would be a criminal act the payment processor would not have any obligation to support the investigation, they just processed a payment.
I agree — I don’t see the connection between the items mentioned on the page and flat out AML/CTF evasion as the title suggests. If I’m wrong, someone please connect the dots.
I took editorial license on the title. Having worked to convince people that blockchain technology really solves more than just the privacy and payment problem I am just annoyed when the industry seemingly erodes trust established over years with a carelessly written manifesto. I just believe it merits more discourse.