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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency has a pretty big problem: "dollars, but without US Government oversight" is exactly what money launderers and other financial criminals want to have. The closer any cryptocurrency gets to being this, the more illegal activity it will facilitate and the more risk the project takes on of getting the entire operation seized and the principals arrested and extradited to the US (see also: Liberty Reserve).

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You could equally say "Speech, but without US government oversight, is exactly what the pedophiles and terrorists want to have".

True. I'm not making a moral judgement here - merely stating that flouting anti-money-laundering laws and facilitating financial crimes has severe legal risks.

I'm honestly not even worried that Facebook is going to flout AML laws. I'm more worried that they'll use the fact that they're using newfangled technology and the political and economic weight of their crypto consortium to get favorable legislation passed. And then, because of said crypto features, we'll end up undermining laws that fight money laundering and other financial crimes.

"undermining laws that fight money laundering and other financial crimes": do these actually work? 5% of the time? 95%?

This is not a problem (for the cryptocurrency "thought leaders" at least). It is literally the primary motivation for its existence. Look at the message embedded into the Bitcoin Genesis block - it's no secret that the entire point was to evade, undermine, and ideally supplant government control over issuance and circulation of money.

It's a problem only for the government and existing financial institutions. Looks no further than China.

Not really. Money laundering, extortion, and other financial crimes have negative externalities. It's absolutely a problem if we invent the technology that allows me to pay a crypto-ransom, since that pretty directly creates a bunch of ransomers.

Also, the principals involved in "disrupting" governments and existing financial institutions also face the problem of government reprisal. Liberty Reserve got seized and their principals arrested and charged with various financial crimes.

> Also, the principals involved in "disrupting" governments and existing financial institutions also face the problem of government reprisal.

Say what you will about Bitcoin, it's been remarkably successful on this front and I'm not exactly sure how.

Bitcoin was designed so there are no obvious principals to have reprisals against. Satoshi kept semi anonymous for a reason.

The government already has these problems: look at the use of real estate to launder money. Eg https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/04/h...

That’s not a problem with cryptocurrency, that’s a regime problem.

It's not a bug it's a feature. Cryptocurrencies were invented by and promoted by libertarians from the beginning.

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