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How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars

theatlantic.com

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Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars

#61
post #13

> 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.

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…

> Illegal operations (the vast majority of which are doing tremendous damage to society) stand to gain the most from anonymous money exchanges.

If we ended the war on individual freedom that is the drug war it would eliminate the vast majority of these illegal operations and the "tremendous damage to society" they cause.

Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ev…

I think the dodgy mortgage officer is actually a pretty good match for a (non-violent) drug dealer. Both are selling something they've been told they shouldn't, to someone who mostly thinks it's in their best interest, and is ultimately profiting by (some or much of the time) hurting that person.
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