The Slow Criminalization of Peer-To-Peer Transfers

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 12:28 PM UTC

gnu8 wrote: post #47

roguecoder wrote: post #32

If we want to draw the connection to cash, companies that trade in large amounts of cash are also subject to regulation and reporting. For example, U.S. financial institutions are required to file Currency Transaction Reports for deposit, withdrawal, exchange of currency, or other payment or transfer that involves more than $10,000. Any organization that is facilitating those trades is subject to financial regulation…

The whole reason we need bitcoin is to circumvent these unjust and immoral laws. If the united states wants to maintain the predominance of the US Dollar as a medium of exchange and a reserve currency, the best thing it could do is repeal the Bank Secrecy Act and dismantle FinCEN.

Post by icebraining » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 12:31 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #101

Kiro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Peer-to-peer electronic cash has numerous uses beyond tax evasion and money laundering What are the biggest ones? I don't see any point of physical cash personally but I'm in a country where no-one uses it.

Transactions solely transacted via physical cash don't require a middleman be paid at every step. Even if you never see a line item for the middle man its effectively part of the bill you pay when you check out anywhere that accepts plastic. The middlemen by setting costs that include a minimum charge per transaction also make transactions below a certain threshold non viable because the transaction fee would be high…

Post by sametmax » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 1:02 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #62

Houshalter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that they are treating it similarly to cash. The problem is that our society is slowly criminalizing cash as well. If cops catch you with a large amount of cash, they can just take it with no recourse. It's assumed to be for criminal activity, since why else would anyone transport cash? Using cash is increasingly seen as suspicious and possibly criminal behavior. If you deposit a large amount of cash it…

Before you run away with your paranoid hat on, think about it the other way around: voters want something done about organized crime, and politicians look for the easy wins. Since large untraceable cash transactions are almost always criminal in nature, it makes sense to lower the weight of evidence required to seize unusually large amounts of cash. And frankly, I'm fairly comfortable with that. It'll never affect me…

Post by chrisbennet » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 1:16 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #148

csomar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suspicious the large criminal operations are using cash (or crypto). They are probably using Banks, Politicians and Regulators. These laws are meant to control the simple citizen, or the smaller criminal operations.

I also think we need to be much tougher on white collar crime. There needs to be far more custodial sentences, and not merely fines. People need to go to prison. White collar crime is such a parasitic attack on the complexity of the modern economy that I think it should be dealt with more harshly than petty street crime. Sentences need to be risk adjusted take into account the low probability of getting caught, not j…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 1:26 PM UTC

b1daly wrote: post #128

The author belies the libertarian quirk of mind that conflates something being regulated with something being made illegal. Quite different things! This strikes me as a cousin to the libertarian intuition that if it is possible to craft an activity that is literally impossible for the government to discover, such an activity simply can't be illegal. (I'm sympathetic to this intuition, but it doesn't take long to see…