I get that money laundering is always linked to criminal activity, but how have we always just accepted the lack of personal privacy when it comes to finance? Privacy is a feature, not a bug; and whilst crypto may not be the way forward, I hope one day we can reach a solution that has both privacy and also safety. The language used by law enforcement is quite alarming, it suggests that they should be privy to ALL tra…
There's a difference between privacy and secrecy. If I'm involving my bank, what I'm doing is already not secret. My bank knows. But normally they keep those things private, because it's generally not anybody's business. There are occasions where society's interest in preventing crime outweighs personal privacy, and one way to look at that is that when something (like, say, ransomware) has an effect on other people,…
A reasonable check and balance would be the requirement for the state to get a warrant, issued by a court when probable cause is found, not 'every transaction over $10,000 is reported to the state for its warrantless mass-surveillance system'.
The $10,000 threshold was set in 1970, when factoring in inflation, it was $70,000 of today's money, and when average income was lower, making its application more seldom still.
The dragnet steadily catches more and more transactions from the twin trends of rising real incomes and inflation reducing the real value of the threshold.