Epoch Times CFO charged in $67M crypto money laundering plot

2) Have you actually done it? There are many services that do this for cheap and fast. Your relatives don't have to open a crypto trading account and use banking to convert the money back into a currency they can use to purchase stuff, they can simply take cash from a chain store, the post office or a local bank branch.

3) When the local currency goes through hyperinflation people store their money in USD, EUR or GOLD. Putting money into crypto is an extra step that don't have to be there doesn't add any value because needs to go through a digital channel like a bank and when shits the fan banks can be PIA. Your local Change office in the mall or the guy at the street who sells and buys USD/EUR/GOLD tend to be more reliable.

I think discussing this under an example of an AML prosecution is silly. AML does work, it just has a lot of collateral privacy loss. Whether that level of privacy is worth the economic destruction of an all-fraud economy is another thing.

The UK banking system has had chip&pin for 20+ years, has had (Europe-wide?) instant payments for at least a decade.

Banking numbers in the UK are push not pull, you cannot take someone else's money just because you have their bank number. *

Payments require CVV (and have done for almost 30 years) and often additional 2fa verification through an app for larger payments. "Card not present" transactions are particular guarded against.

The regularatory framework is such that the banks must absorb the cost of fraud, unless they can demonstrate the customer has been particular negligent. The average banking customer in the UK does not live in fear of "identity theft", and does not own "identity insurance" or similar protection packages, the legal framework provides protection.

Solving the problem for international transfers simply requires greater international cooperation, not a different technical solution. It is a particular shame of Brexit that the UK has lost it's ability to lead in this area, because Europe generally has had a similar transformation over the past 20 years.

Expanding that banking cooperation to bring in more trusted countries would further reduce the cost of international remittance.

Someone trying to sell a technical solution to a social problem ought to always be treated with extra skepticism.

* Some pedant will point out direct debits, but that is only available to trusted providers, and is backed up by the Direct Debit Guarentee, so the risk won't fall to the customer if things do go wrong.

It really doesn't:

https://content.11fs.com/article/aml-is-the-worlds-most-inef...

> This week I had an opportunity to properly deep dive into this work by Ronald F Pol. It finds that AML policy has less than a 0.1% impact on criminal finances. Compliance costs exceed recovered illicit funds recovered more than 100x. Banks, taxpayers, and citizens are penalised more than criminals. Policymakers keep blaming banks and hitting them with massive fines hoping to fix the problem, but it doesn't.

AML prosecutions happen, but that's mostly because it's easy to find otherwise-innocent people who run afoul of the rules, or as something to tack on when you're already prosecuting someone for something else. Not because they're doing any good against criminals who otherwise wouldn't be caught.

Just think about it. If someone is being prosecuted for money laundering in addition to an underlying crime, they would still have been prosecuted for the underlying crime without it. If they're only being prosecuted for money laundering, we don't even know that there was an underlying crime, in which case why are we prosecuting someone engaging in no apparent harmful activity?

> the economic destruction of an all-fraud economy

Where does this assumption come from? Historically most monetary transactions occurred in anonymous cash. Was the result "economic destruction" or "an all-fraud economy"?

The proposal isn't to legalize fraud, it's to legalize the digital equivalent of cash.

> Payments require CVV

Many companies regularly violate regulations and store CVVs against your will. How do you think millions of CC CVVs get leaked in many of these major hacks?

> Solving the problem for international transfers simply requires greater international cooperation

Sounds great in theory. How long has traditional finance had to work out these problems? We're in 2023 and I still can't send money to an US account without paying absurd fees.

Now compare that to what several crypto projects have achieved a handful of years after their inception.

> Someone trying to sell a technical solution to a social problem ought to always be treated with extra skepticism.

What makes secure payments more social than secure messaging or secure browsing? Imagine trying to solve TLS and E2E messaging with social solutions.