The World Is Losing the Money Laundering Fight

bloomberg.com

20 points·bobrenjc93··5 comments

Seems a lot like the fight against piracy which mainly makes life more difficult for legitimate users while having a minor impact on those targeted.

What's interesting is that the most effective tool against piracy has turned out to be making content a service instead of a good. It's a bit scary to think what this would mean if applied to all monetary transactions.

Can you elaborate on that thought?

An end to offline physical currency. All transactions must be conducted online, be it through a credit card (an already common use case), money transfer app, or PTT funds transfer. At that point the end run around the system would be to barter instead of using a currency, which is much less efficient at anything other than very small scale.

I think you missed a step. We dont have one service or even a slew of services directly weakening piracy. Steam and Netflix arent made to stop piracy but to serve pirates... Among others.

To reduce money laundering you "servicize" the industries needing to launder money. Legalize drugs. Provide legal gambling options. There's more you could do but im not libertarian enough.

When financial transaction privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have financial transaction privacy.

Interestingly, things like cryptocurrency are increasingly used as the crowbar that governments use to pry their way into anything they like, either legitimately, or far too often, not.

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