Every time I have to fill in some AML (anti-money laundering) form I think how much of a waste of time and money it is for every party involved since the real big fish are getting around it with professional help. It's all very kafkaesque and invasive so I come to the conclusion it's more about powerful governments existing to gain more power than it is about solving any injustice.
The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#22After being in the crypto space for a while, and thinking a lot about the problem of tracing money, I've come to the conclusion that the system I'd prefer would be a hybrid. Everyone needs a quota of anonymous spending, say $50/day, $1000/ month and anything after that is public on government ledger. I've mentioned this to a few friends, who've always called it dystopian, yet all alternate systems seems to be worse i…
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Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#23We're looking for the "Goldilocks Zone" of privacy. We want: * Enough privacy that activists don't wind up facing death squads * Not so much privacy that drug cartels wind up running the country. The problem is that cryptography is all or nothing: for a given observer, the transaction is either private or it isn't. I'm fascinated by models like differential privacy. Maybe there are ways of making systems which snare…
There is nothing about the nature of privacy itself that leads to drug cartels running the country. There could be a world with perfect privacy and a perfect justice system where this wouldn't be a problem at all. Of course that isn't realistic, but the tendency should be to always trend towards more privacy and less corruption. Thinking that a private yet safe world isn't possible is a fallacy, because privacy itself isn't the source of these issues.
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#24Every time I have to fill in some AML (anti-money laundering) form I think how much of a waste of time and money it is for every party involved since the real big fish are getting around it with professional help. It's all very kafkaesque and invasive so I come to the conclusion it's more about powerful governments existing to gain more power than it is about solving any injustice.
Nothing will be 100% proof around evasion or exploitation.
The answer isn't to do nothing and let it be a free-for-all.
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#25After being in the crypto space for a while, and thinking a lot about the problem of tracing money, I've come to the conclusion that the system I'd prefer would be a hybrid. Everyone needs a quota of anonymous spending, say $50/day, $1000/ month and anything after that is public on government ledger. I've mentioned this to a few friends, who've always called it dystopian, yet all alternate systems seems to be worse i…
> a quota of anonymous spending, say $50/day, $1000/ month and anything after that is public on government ledger You're describing cash + digital money.
Yea, but cash isn’t very web3 now is it.
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#26After being in the crypto space for a while, and thinking a lot about the problem of tracing money, I've come to the conclusion that the system I'd prefer would be a hybrid. Everyone needs a quota of anonymous spending, say $50/day, $1000/ month and anything after that is public on government ledger. I've mentioned this to a few friends, who've always called it dystopian, yet all alternate systems seems to be worse i…
> yet all alternate systems seems to be worse in terms of illegal abuse worse than that system, sure. Worse compared to a fascist state that has near total control over everyone? I don't think it's clear that tax evasion and black market deals are worse than that, the scale is just different. China is much deeper in technology than the Soviet Union ever was. Imagine what Stalin had done with China's abilities in 2023…
It’s not either or in an all or nothing sense, and it’s not either or necessarily either. There’s a very appropriate comment on another sub-thread pointing out that privacy and corruption aren’t necessarily linked. We need to balance as we progress towards a more private and less corrupt world.
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#27Every time I have to fill in some AML (anti-money laundering) form I think how much of a waste of time and money it is for every party involved since the real big fish are getting around it with professional help. It's all very kafkaesque and invasive so I come to the conclusion it's more about powerful governments existing to gain more power than it is about solving any injustice.
Like many laws, they apply to you and me, not to the oligarchs. The international lawyers and accountants are the gatekeepers that navigate them through the loopholes.
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#28Every time I have to fill in some AML (anti-money laundering) form I think how much of a waste of time and money it is for every party involved since the real big fish are getting around it with professional help. It's all very kafkaesque and invasive so I come to the conclusion it's more about powerful governments existing to gain more power than it is about solving any injustice.
Nothing will be 100% proof around evasion or exploitation. The answer isn't to do nothing and let it be a free-for-all.
It's darkly funny how nearly every control mechanism in capitalist society equates to merely making a particular action more or less expensive.
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#29Every time I have to fill in some AML (anti-money laundering) form I think how much of a waste of time and money it is for every party involved since the real big fish are getting around it with professional help. It's all very kafkaesque and invasive so I come to the conclusion it's more about powerful governments existing to gain more power than it is about solving any injustice.
Nothing will be 100% proof around evasion or exploitation. The answer isn't to do nothing and let it be a free-for-all.
I think both sentiments have merit and are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Money stuff tends to follow power laws. The basic, beaurocratic checks probably dissuade 80% of offenders while only stopping maybe 20% of the volume.
Doing nothing would leave those 80% of offenders free to launder which seems bad. Meanwhile, it seems fair to call the measures mostly ineffective.
There’s also a cost to these measures. They frequently block or add friction for people just trying to do legitimate business. Is it worth it?
Re: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
#30We're looking for the "Goldilocks Zone" of privacy. We want: * Enough privacy that activists don't wind up facing death squads * Not so much privacy that drug cartels wind up running the country. The problem is that cryptography is all or nothing: for a given observer, the transaction is either private or it isn't. I'm fascinated by models like differential privacy. Maybe there are ways of making systems which snare…
Small nitpick: it isn’t entirely true that cryptography is “all or nothing”. With things like time lock crypto and proof of work you can effectively have a scheme where large scale snooping is impossible (would take too much compute), but any individual transaction can be decrypted with a bit of work.