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Comment by m_a_g | Hacker News Reader

Probably the miners. This is one of the unfortunate side effects of fully decentralized networks.

Miners are unlikely to be money transmitters under current regulatory guidance since they never "accept" money for transmission. They only verify transactions that they never have custody over.

That sounds to me as if going after the maker of a knife that was used in a murder if they can't find the killer.

When your only tool is a hammer, you aim for the nails.

In this case the maker of the knife is the person who wrote the code. The person who did the illegal action (processed the transaction) is the miner. Or miners for multiple confirmations?

More like going after the shop owner who intentionally turns a blind eye to ongoing illegal activity on their property.

> That sounds to me as if going after the maker of a knife that was used in a murder if they can't find the killer.

...or the maker of a pipe bomb if they can't find the bomber (or even if they can, since there aren't a lot of legitimate uses for pipe bombs).

I can't really think of any use for for a cryptocurrency mixer than as part of a scheme for obscuring the true source of some funds.

I don't think it would make sense to go after individual miners for processing transaction initiated by a mixer, just like it wouldn't make sense to go after a bank for processing a legitimate-looking transaction that was part of some kind of fraud scheme that had no awareness of.

I can’t think of any purpose of a VPN except to obfuscate your internet history. What are you trying to hide?

> I can’t think of any purpose of a VPN except to obfuscate your internet history. What are you trying to hide?

Money laundering (obfuscating the source of money) is actually a crime and for good reason. Obfuscating your internet history is not.

isn't it only money laundering if the funds themselves were illegally obtained? if I buy crypto with my wages from a legal job, put them through a tumbler, and then buy a dildo, why is that a problem?

It's a problem if the source of funds are obtained illegally. Using tumblers is not illegal, but if using tumblers to make 'dirty' money appear clean then that's a problem.

>>Money laundering (obfuscating the source of money)

No, that is not the definition of money laundering. It does not broadly criminalize efforts to maintain financial privacy.

Money laundering means hiding the source of illegally obtained money.

Yes this is correct but you're only halfway through the complete definition of money laundering. Reading this thread was starting to fry my brain due to the amount of people that think money laundering is only about concealing the origin of illegally sourced funds. It's not just about hiding proceeds. You can also use money laundering to hide clean funds from uncle Sam. Take a look at Politicians,Billionaires,The orange president himself and ask yourself why do they all pay such low taxes? The panama papers were about rich people hiding their legally(keyword)sourced funds from say...assets,properties,other investments in offshore bank accounts located in places like Seychelles and panama while setting up shell companies to avoid the tax bracket. Doing all of this is by definition money laundering. Hope this provides clarity.

>>You can also use money laundering to hide clean funds from uncle Sam.

That is NOT defined as money laundering. That is tax evasion.

https://www.vernitaxlaw.com/money-laundering-is-tax-evasion/

I stand corrected.

I use a VPN to access my work's corporate services which are not available outside of the corporate network.

This is probably the single most common use of VPN software.

why do you close the door to the toilet when you do your business there?

I use a VPN to access my home network when I'm not at home. Most businesses use it similarly to let their employees access the work network remotely. This is a far more common use of VPNs than the "cover your tracks" use (for which VPNs are usually terrible anyway).

I also sometimes use a VPN when an Internet hotspot seems shady, or provides a crappy connection in some way (spoofing DNS replies to insert advertising on NXDOMAIN, for example).

That sounds like a kind of "everybody is a criminal unless proved otherwise" argument? How about arguing, bitcoin makes simple privacy the default? You don't have to be a drug dealer, to want to keep everybody else's nose out of your business.

> That sounds like a kind of "everybody is a criminal unless proved otherwise" argument? How about arguing, bitcoin makes simple privacy the default? You don't have to be a drug dealer, to want to keep everybody else's nose out of your business.

IIRC, Bitcoin doesn't make privacy the default. It's easy to trace transaction on its blockchain, hence the need for mixers if you want to obscure the origin of some cryptocurrency.

But does that identify anybody? I'm a noob here; does every bitcoin ID come with a user identifying record?

No, taint analysis is done backwards from points of transaction (Coinbase, retailers, etc) and the US government clearly does a lot of it. If you run a Bitcoin casino, the DOJ will email you asking for info about a given Bitcoin address/txn from time to time, for example, as they track the exchange of hands.

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