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> People need to learn about Bitcoin. Indeed. Bitcoin is now a major player in the money laundering business. NFTs are so much better than fake pocelain!
> I can invalidate Bitcoin, by comparing it to NFTs. I'm sorry, that's not how it works.
In this day and age "money laundering" just means "not bending over and letting the state tax you to oblivion". TFA is just scare mongering. People need to learn about Bitcoin.
It's very simple, there is more incentive for money laundering than there is fighting it. It's the same reason there are more lawyers working for large companies vs small guys. The invisible hand that determines the structure of our society.
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> Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash. Cash ? As in hundred dollar bills?
Yes, duffel bags full. But it doesn't take too many cash purchases that are not inline with your tax returns before somebody is going to start snooping around. edit: although sometimes, a lot longer than one might expect.
Citation needed? Where did you hear that this is a routine occurrence? That seems risky for everybody involved, and it requires a report to the government from the seller.
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That wouldn't help in the situations described in the article. For example where individuals buy drugs with small amounts of cash, then that cash is used to buy things like luxury watches and iphones, then those items are taken overseas and sold. Seemingly the only effective way to solve this would be to ban purchasing highly resellable items with cash and requiring that cash to be deposited in to the system first.
In Italy, it’s illegal to pay in cash anything over 5000 euros
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You mean they implemented laws under the guise of "money laundering". They just want to track what you spend your money on, that's step one. Step two is to restrict what you can spend your money on, although this is a partial side effect of part 1.
> Step two is to restrict what you can spend your money on Where do people get these ideas? How do they sincerely hold them? No non-religious government wants to restrict what you can spend your money on. They want to get a cut of your money, but otherwise it's strictly better for them if you spend as much of it as possible. If they don't want you to have things, they just attack those things directly, like hard drug…
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It used to be super common for many small businesses to be cash only or a 10% discount for cash. Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance. I haven't seen a cash only business since covid. With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users, any business that is pulling in huge sums of cash well beyond the average is going to look increasingly suspicious.
> With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users Services for laundering cash are going to see a huge uptick in turnover. You put the cash in the local slot machine, the slot machine owner then purchases legitimate services from your wife / cousin / other family member’s business. Or you rent a hole in the wall location massage business that that maybe legitimately employs one or two people but on the books they ma…
I’m not sure the stress is worth (presumably) 20% or so savings for his income.
(Note the two and the zeros in “$20 billion to $80 billion.”)
Aside: The author of this article wrote a fantastic novel that not a lot of people know about called “The Debt to Pleasure”. One of the best instances of the “unreliable narrator” I’ve ever read.
Second, I submit that money laundering should not be considered a crime at all. Monitoring it (for example, banks required to report large cash transactions to the government) just leads to mass surveillance of innocent people.
Transferring money from A to B - why should that be a crime? The point of anti-money-laundering laws is that the money generated at point A may have been generated illegally. It isn't the money transfer that is the problem, it is the illegal activity. The police need to put in the effort to prosecute that illegal activity.
This is reminiscent of the continual pressure to break end-to-end encryption. The police want an easy way to do their (admittedly difficult) job. But the price is just too high: mass surveillance, and many false positives, affecting the general populace.