Ah they now have an angle to go after bitcoin.
Bitcoin makes money transfer easier to monitor. Why do they want to go after Bitcoin?
How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The entire concept of "financial crimes" has only been applied in a widespread manner with the advent of the war on drugs, which many of us oppose for a variety of very valid reasons.
Actually, the Bank Secrecy Act was passed alongside RICO. The target was organized crime, not drugs. Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, but aggressive drug prohibition in the U.S. dated back long before that, and the explosion in imprisonment as a result of drug prosecutions didn't really kick in until a decade later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incarc... . While "financial crimes…
"organized crime" to the level that necessitated the RICO act only came about because of the war on drugs (in that particular case, alcohol was the drug in question).
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#43> LR's most basic criminal offense is simple: It didn't know or want to know the identities of its clients. They allowed people to transfer big sums of money without checking their identification. That this is a crime disgusts me. I should be able to do whatever I want with my money without anyone knowing who I am. That's how it worked up to the past century.
Umm, no, you shouldn't be able to do everything you want with your money. A payment processor has a fiduciary duty for its customers. So if you are sending $100,000 to Nigeria to pay for puppies, the Payment processor better stop this transaction to protect you form being scammed. Now maybe you are smart and savvy enough to be not scammed but an average joe isn't. There are many rules in the payment industry but KYC…
> A payment processor has a fiduciary duty for its customers.
Oh? This time the fiduciary duty is towards customers and not shareholders? :p
Funny how most times it's trotted out as an excuse for some scumbaggery by a corporation, but now it's a reason to "protect" customers.
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering might be more interesting to a hacker. As I've discussed previously[1], Taibbi is not noted for being a reliable systems expert on the international banking system. The simple facts are damning enough without layers of editorializing cruft from an unreliable source. For example, consider the assertion that people need to go to jail for fraud in the HSBC case…
For the life of me, I don't understand why the biggest investors and executives, who are rich because "with great risk of captial comes great opportunity for success". So they get the 99% of the profit, they get the big paychecks, because they took the big risk in the beginning. But on the flip side, they don't accept the risk for the behavior of their company. I don't understand how the system operates whereby they…
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Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Difference is, there is no one behind bitcoin. No one to arrest. The only "real people" "behind" it are the Exchanges. No, the real people behind it are the miners. You know, the people that create bitcoins and validate every bitcoin transaction?
Let them bust a few miners. More will take their place.
If miners are ever prosecuted, then that is a pretty big signal that the U.S. has completely lost its shit. Submitting the outputs of hash functions to a distribitued p2p network sounds like extremely basic free speech to me.
As a young person with no wife/kids and plenty of tech job prospects, I would probably start researching moving abroad.
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering might be more interesting to a hacker. As I've discussed previously[1], Taibbi is not noted for being a reliable systems expert on the international banking system. The simple facts are damning enough without layers of editorializing cruft from an unreliable source. For example, consider the assertion that people need to go to jail for fraud in the HSBC case…
> Truth be told, if you start doing this in an equitable fashion with the goal of "punishing" bad banking behavior, you'll target a lot of lower-middle-class mortgage brokers from the 2008 mortgage crisis who knowingly committed fraud, which seems like an undesirable result. I think it a very desirable result. When it came time to break up the mafia, the prosecutors didn't say "we can't get the dons right off the bet…
Baffling. You can't even get a Mafia don for something his hit man did, unless you can prove the don was involved. RICO isn't a license to throw people in jail because of some hand-waving about responsibility. I don't think the law works how you think it works. When you talk about HSBC officers you're talking about things probably >90% of them didn't even intend to happen, much less had any provable connection to. Even actual bad guys are hard to put in jail, never mind if this stuff about blaming bank executives for everything has any significant merit.
I'm double baffled that you think the mortgage officer example--the harried guy in a cheap suit overlooking some fudged numbers here and there--is at all comparable to a drug dealer or a hit man, both of whom knowingly destroy people for a living with their different weapons.
Liberty Reserve is a poor counter-example because the Liberty Reserve guys allegedly laundered billions of dollars, on purpose, provably knowing they were doing it, in fact setting up an illegal business offshore so they could do it. If the allegations are true there's no doubt they are actual bad guys. Oh, and it took a two year long international effort to bring them down.
And I remember there being some HN indignation when Liberty Reserve was taken down, which is ironic when you compare how angry people are about HSBC doing much less. Imagine the response if Liberty Reserve was owned by Goldman Sachs!
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the Bank Secrecy Act was passed alongside RICO. The target was organized crime, not drugs. Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, but aggressive drug prohibition in the U.S. dated back long before that, and the explosion in imprisonment as a result of drug prosecutions didn't really kick in until a decade later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incarc... . While "financial crimes…
"organized crime" to the level that necessitated the RICO act only came about because of the war on drugs (in that particular case, alcohol was the drug in question).
While it's true that organized crime grew up during the bootlegging era, organized crime was on the upswing in the 1960's and 1970's, at a time long after prohibition had ended and before the modern drug war had started. Clearly, the fuel to feed organized crime existed without prohibition. Given that fact, it's hard to say that those organizations wouldn't have grown bigger and more sophisticated during that period anyway (just like corporations did, for reasons that had nothing to do with prohibition).
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the life of me, I don't understand why the biggest investors and executives, who are rich because "with great risk of captial comes great opportunity for success". So they get the 99% of the profit, they get the big paychecks, because they took the big risk in the beginning. But on the flip side, they don't accept the risk for the behavior of their company. I don't understand how the system operates whereby they…
That sounds nice, but it's impossible for an executive of a multinational bank to know what every employee is doing at all times. It's not like their quarterly business review slides include, "committed fraud to increase revenue 20%."
Quite frankly, I don't care. They as executives are trusted to handle every dollar, every share. They are the stewards leading their company, making the decisions, creating the profit or loss. When they succeed, they take the praise and the reward. When they fail... it's too hard for them to manage everyone? What?
The buck stops there. It must stop there. It is THEIR PROBLEM to control the misbehavior of those who they entrust with their capital, not OUR problem.
Those that Executives entrust with their assets are the Executive's responsibility.
As a citizen, I don't get to say "Your accountant is immoral, fire him". I don't get to have a say in the ethics of private sector employees. I don't get to speak to who an executive entrusts with capital. I'm not responsible for their actions by design.
So with that isolation of the private sector comes the responsibility of the private sector to handle it's own shit.
Buck stops with the executive. I imagine the richest people alive, if they can "solve" the problem of What I think: they don't want to solve it. Why would they, unless we forced them?
If they don't have control over their assets and those that manage it, why do they get the profit from what they do not control and do not risk? Either they accept responsibility for their assets and those that manage it... or the public should get the credit and profit from an asset the public is forced to manage and protect.
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds nice, but it's impossible for an executive of a multinational bank to know what every employee is doing at all times. It's not like their quarterly business review slides include, "committed fraud to increase revenue 20%."
Quite frankly, I don't care . They as executives are trusted to handle every dollar, every share. They are the stewards leading their company, making the decisions, creating the profit or loss. When they succeed, they take the praise and the reward. When they fail... it's too hard for them to manage everyone? What? The buck stops there. It must stop there. It is THEIR PROBLEM to control the misbehavior of those who t…
This sounds like an easy way to make sure nobody wants to be an executive of a major bank. Why would anyone want to take charge of an organization where the actions of any one of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees can get them thrown in jail? Do you have the ability to monitor that? Or anyone you know? Would you bet your freedom on it? Do you want bank executives to be the sort of people who play the odds on going to jail vs. getting money? The smartest people in the world have trouble getting your friend feed to display ads you want to see. The smartest people in the world cannot get their 1ms trades--to use your example--to succeed more than 50+epsilon percent of the time. They don't have this genius power to monitor all fraud that you think they should have. And before you argue that banks don't even try to set up monitoring systems, they actually do. Every major bank now is into big data and machine learning precisely to stop employees and customers from breaking the law. (They are hiring, by the way.) This is in response to Congressional and popular pressure.
In summary, I cannot think of a single significant way in which you understand what you're talking about.
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trade-of here is individual liberty vs what we know the consequences will be from allowing truly anonymous exchange. For all things in life: cui bono. Illegal operations (the vast majority of which are doing tremendous damage to society) stand to gain the most from anonymous money exchanges. So that's who end up using the service. So even die hard libertarians who value personal freedom such as anonymity a great…
Isn't cash more popular than Liberty Reserve and just as anonymous? (Albeit more cumbersome to transmit around the world.) So isn't your argument also that cash encourages crime? And if so shouldn't it be abolished so that we can prevent activities that damage society?
Things aren't so clear cut. Laws have to draw boundaries around things all the time, even if the particular location of any particular boundary cannot be easily justified, the necessity of the boundary's existence most certainly can. In this case, we can regulate electronic transactions, but we can't regulate cash. Furthermore, it happens to be the case that when you allow electronic transactions willy-nilly bad things happen, and it's harder for those bad things to happen when cash is involved (Breaking Bad would have been completely different if Walter White had hid is money in Bitcoin). So, we regulate electronic transactions more than we do cash. It doesn't solve all the problems, but it does mitigate them.