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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

Cartels, terrorist cells, and other unsavory entities also use cash, but you don't see the DOJ prosecuting everyone who has accepted cash as payment.

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In fairness, if I set up a bank which, by accident or by design, made it exceedingly easy to launder millions in cash relatively quickly, you can bet the DOJ would have a problem with that.

Transporting millions in cash is risky (either you trust the courier with that and risk their life, or you do it yourself and risk yours), and doing so internationally is extremely challenging and/or expensive. By contrast, doing it digitally is quite easy and fast.

It feels a bit disingenuous to insist the two are the same.

HSBC cooperated with cartels to launder money, apparently they even opened special counters for them to deposit cash at.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC_Mexico#Money_laundering

Public companies tend not to get punished because it ultimately punishes the shareholders. Chickenshit club book talks about all the reasons why the DOJ doesn't go after the big public companies with criminal prosecution.

When was the last time a banker was put in jail for money laundering?

Actually, we do see it.

Along with Civil Asset forfeiture mentioned by others, there are also:

* Know Your Customer laws,

* mandatory Suspicious Action Reports of all transactions over a certain value,

* anti-Smurfing or anti-Structuring laws that against structuring deposits to be under the threshold of SAR reports,

* a whole host of foreign transaction laws

* and plenty more...

So yes, prosecution of use of cash is very alive and healthy with people getting prosecuted for all of these crimes related to use of cash. And this is before any prosecutions that establish direct use for terrorism or drug cartels.

I've used cash for over 20 years to buy things, I have not been prosecuted for it. Neither have any family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc that I know. Note that I said "everyone", since the comment I replied to basically said everyone who used some shitcoin service would be open to prosecution.

No one said you will get prosecuted, they are saying organisations that facilitated conversions between crypto and USD will be investigated.

Wait, isn't that basically the basis for civil forfeiture? "We don't know why you would have this much cash, so prove it isn't related to drugs/laundering"?

There's no trail (or not an easy trail of evidence) to know for sure where cash payments went from and to, whereas blockchain provides that trail - you just need to figure out who owns or has claimed to own the wallet etc; having that as a resource would make conviction much easier, and magnitudes easier to find people involved. I don't know how pleading ignorance would hold up depending on the role you played in any illegal activities.

Isn't traceability a positive aspect for cryptocurrency in this case? You've got nothing to worry about if you're an honest investor, and frankly, this is one of the benefits of a pseudoanonymous crypto.

> Isn't traceability a positive aspect for cryptocurrency in this case?

Not if you have to hire a lawyer to show the Bitcoins which left a violent criminal’s wallet were transferred to you legitimately.

I don't see this ever being an issue, frankly.

For law enforcement, definitely

You definitely see them prosecuting people who accept cash from cartels and terrorist cells or engineering financial entities explicitly to do so. Tether looks a whole whole lot like one of those.

That is an incorrect comparison. They punish those who use cash illegally, just like how they seek to punish those who use cryptocurrency illegally.

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