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Comment by QAPereo | Hacker News Reader

It's probably also a dream come true for anyone who wants to launder some money.

Monero certainly is. Money laundering is now solved thanks to this.

Want to hide your money? Use Monero. There are even services that fulfill BTC orders: you send them Monero, they send BTC to the specified address. There are also services that go the other way.

It uses ring encryption and appears to be well-implemented. It will be with us for a long time.

Monero might obscure the origin of the funds, but so does using cash. Money laundering requires an extra step - finding a plausible alternative origin of the dirty funds.

Monero in and of itself is fungible, but it doesn't 'solve' money laundering.

Exactly. It's never been difficult to move money around freely if you know how to. It's the "layering" which is the hard part i.e. avoiding questions from the relevant authorities of "where did this money come from". Monero doesn't provide good answers to those, and if anything it would raise suspicions.

Someone can send someone else $1M in Monero and there's nothing you can do to know about it. You can't do that very easily with cash. It's trivial with Monero.

As far as raising questions, it's like cash, but it's also extremely convenient to transfer large amounts.

How do you figure? I think the general wisdom among people who have a deep understanding of block-chains is that it is about the worst way you could possibly try to launder money. Every transaction you make is forever immortalized in a publicly accessible record book. Not to mention that there is strong KYC at the entry exit points between cash and crypto currencies.

You make/invest heavily into an ICO, send your CP/ordered hit/fentanyl proceeds into it, and then sell your ICO tokens for ETH.

Most ICOs don't do KYC; if they're asking for crypto-based investments they likely aren't asking for conventional investors and aren't vetting the speculators who only want to know how long they have to hold the token before dumping on the market

thats no longer true. Now-a-days, ICOs ask for all kind of KYC documents - passports, utility bills, etc.

A few maybe. It's definitely the reason we (Pink) went ICO for funding, to be able to raise money because real-world contacts didn't like the potential link to funding our venture.

I read your site last night and was intrigued by the bold use of traditional finance language to describe your ICO. "Token-shares", dividends, etc. You're not worried about US securities law?

We are worried about the SEC as much as we're worried about any government action. We're operating very tightly.

It's a travesty that some of these companies raise millions without giving up equity, voting, or dividends.

And yet hackers steal these coins and seem to do alright, Tumblers seem to anonymize currency too.

Do you have any stats on the percentage of traditional financial crimes that go unsolved vs the percentage of crypto-currency crimes that go unsolved? You would have a hard time finding a major crypto-currency heist, dark market, or rogue exchange that hasn't been tracked down and shut down.

Yes but cryptocurrency thieves (i.e. exchange hackers, etc) are currently batting around 100% uncaught, afaik.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/09/17/kim-nilsson-...

Pretty sure they got the guy behind a lot of the thefts when they arrested that BTC-e guy earlier this year.

The biggest tumbler closed down and none of the other existing tumblers are very trustful.

There are a few coins that offer complete privacy. XMR, Pivx, ZCoin. Just to name a few.

Only one of those three is private by default. If it isnt private by default, calling it a privacy coin or saying it offers 'complete privacy' is farcical. Monero is the only way to go at the moment.

Even Monero isn't completely private. If you use an exchange to get in an out of Monero, they can probably link your transactions given an approximate timeframe.

Until we have serious ringsizes this will remain an issue.

I bought a small and equal amount of ZCash and Monero, so I don't really have a horse in this race, but what's your objection to having optional in the clear transactions? It just sounds like the flimsy Monero shilling that predictably pops up on any public forum when privacy coins are mentioned.

I wouldn't describe LocalBitcoins as having "strong KYC"...

LocalBitcoins is pretty impractical for significant sums of cash.

If you have significant sums of cash, you can pay someone to sit on LocalBitcoins cashing out all day.

How do you mean impractical? I've done 100k+ trades just fine. For bigger sums you'll usually have the exchanger fly one of their reps over from another country.

I would consider LBTC rather impractical for smaller trades though.

Did you do this trades in cash?

Yeah, that's the idea.

What security precautions did you have to handle such a large amounts of cash? Did you have problem with law enforcement? I heard they really like to seize this piles of cash.

Sorry for being nosey but I'm genuinely curious!

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