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Squillions: How money laundering won

lrb.co.uk

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Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#211

Post by handle584 »

lxgr wrote: post #184
satvikpendem wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your points usage, airline points can be much more valuable than the 3% fee.

On average they’re worth much less. After all, why would airlines cross-subsidize a card on which they earn <3%?

On average yes, but for savvy people they are worth much more for biz/first class travel. There is even a whole industry built around mileage booking.

Why subsidize? There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit. Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#213

Post by chadgpt3 »

bradley13 wrote: post #60

First off, money laundering does not require cash. So the premise is a bit strange. 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…

We can separate the two things - the transaction could be surveilled without being a crime. They'd only have a legitimate use for that surveillance data if it was found to be connected with an actual crime. (Of course, like all surveillance, it would be badly misused)

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#214

Post by chadgpt3 »

pjc50 wrote: post #74
mike_hearn wrote: post #66

I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff. A few minor comments. My wife and I have owned and used 1000 CHF notes quite a few times in the past. The last two times we moved apartments I paid part of the moving fee with a 1000 CHF note. We've also bought furniture this way. Nobody was surprised to see this and the notes were…

> You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist Yes, although this is mostly by capping the highest regularly circulating note at £50 after the war and then waiting for inflation. > And there's so much street crime, [mostly false] > and the police care so little about burglary, Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports; there was a joke during the Mandelson scandal that this was the one time th…

VAT/GST is a direct tax on productive economic activity (as opposed to some proxy like income or capital gains) and I'm sure there are good economic arguments why that's the best kind of tax.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#215

Post by chadgpt3 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #162
alberth wrote: post #135

> I haven’t even mentioned gold, which is used all the time in criminal transactions, let alone cryptocurrency, the single biggest recent innovation in money laundering . Curious how that line is received within the HN crowd.

It seems pretty obvious that cryptocurrency can be used to transfer funds. The question is whether this is actually an innovation or just method #373453 of doing the thing that was always possible a million other ways. Suppose someone has a million dollars in cash and wants to turn it into "clean" money in a bank account, or transfer it to another country. They pick any goods with a high cost to weight ratio and a th…

There was one before Bitcoin called Liberty Reserve. It was a website. You could mail cash to some guy and he'd put it in your account and you could request cash mailed back to you and you could transfer your balance to other people on the website.

It was a centralized operation. The feds seized the server and arrested the guy. For money laundering, obviously. No more Liberty Reserve.

You can't do that with Bitcoin - that's the innovation. It's very censor-resistant.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#216

Post by chadgpt3 »

Matl wrote: post #158
Anonyneko wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering my country of origin is using crypto for sanction busting at an enormous scale, I just take this line as absolute truth.

Sanction busting is an interesting thing because states are sovereign so if one state imposes sanctions on another, it's not illegal for the sanctioned state to do everything to ignore/bypass them, unless we consider the sanctioning state to be somehow above others/source of truth for what's legal.

It's usually illegal in the counterparty's state. If I'm in the EU and I sell weapons to Iran, Iran isn't breaking Iranian law, but I'm breaking EU law. Iran is also breaking EU law but that's irrelevant to them the same way it's irrelevant to me that I break North Korean law all the time.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#217

Post by chadgpt3 »

nntlol wrote: post #201

Nowadays banks spy on normal people in the disguise of reporting to government about illegal activity. The people who are in the illegal game always have their own ways to hide money and that is so sophisticated that no one can know they have that much money so the spying only de-anonymize the common peoples. People do think bitcoin as option but nothing is private they also can be tracked by chainalysis.com One thin…

Exchanges are banned from trading Monero, that makes it hard to get, but they can't really stop any private transactions, by the design. There are also onion sites that claim to swap one for the other.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#218

Post by IncreasePosts »

lxgr wrote: post #199
IncreasePosts wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? There's zero % interest for every purchase if you pay for it fully the next billing cycle

Yes, but consider who pays the merchant fee in the end. Sure, you might be getting a kickback of that in rewards, but usually less than you pay yourself in fees indirectly.

Very few places offer discounts for cash, so ultimately everyone pays it, but only those with good credit card rewards get some of it back.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#219

Post by lxgr »

handle584 wrote: post #211
lxgr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average they’re worth much less. After all, why would airlines cross-subsidize a card on which they earn <3%?

On average yes, but for savvy people they are worth much more for biz/first class travel. There is even a whole industry built around mileage booking. Why subsidize? There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit. Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks [0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/ggUduBmv…

> There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit.

This completely disregards the opportunity cost of being able to sell the same seat. Even if the airline is absolutely unable to sell the empty seats cheaper, consider what consistently giving away seats for free would do to the remaining paid seats...

> Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks

They certainly make some money from this, but definitely not the bulk, or even all of it. Don't believe everything you hear on the Internet, even (or maybe especially) if it's presented in a shiny, high production value video.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#220

Post by gwbas1c »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #170
gwbas1c wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What became clearer the 2nd time around was that Walter White was a horrible criminal who's downfall was that he was greedy and didn't know when to stop.

The show is a show. Do the real life drug cartels "know where to stop"? They basically own some countries at this point.

Well, yes, it's fiction. My point is that Walter White, as a written fictional character, is written as a horrible criminal.

Pay closer attention to Mike's criticism of Walter's antics; or the general contrast between Gus, who is a professional criminal, and Walter, especially when Gus "fires" Walter. Ultimately, things end up poorly for Mike and Gus because Walter doesn't know how to behave as a criminal. (Or as a tech startup founder, for that matter.)

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