Binance investigated by CFTC over whether US residents trade on platform

And how much privacy do you violate to stop bad actors? You're okay with AML laws, which are a form of warrantless financial mass-surveillance, so how about wiretapping all communications as well?

How about prohibiting end-to-end-encryption, and public access to strong cryptography? As money becomes wholly digital, you will need warrantless mass-surveillance of all communication to maintain warrantless mass-surveillance of all financial transactions.

Perhaps your downvoters (and mine too) in this thread would like to argue that it's a slippery slope akin to surveillance to accept AML laws which a priori purport to protect us from the effects of these crimes while only taking freedom further away and creating more space for despotic selective enforcement. I'm sympathetic to this argument, but only to a point. Another side to this argument is that AML laws should be resisted not just because they are right or wrong, but because they are ineffective.

My problem is while I may have sympathies to these ideas in theory, in practice, proactively addressing, enforcing and prosecuting money laundering is something just about every government has a vested interest in doing because governments fund themselves through taxation. I can understand the desire to limit government AML overstep and surveillance, but wouldn't that simply mean that we leave AML enforcement and surveillance to the private markets? Would it mean we somehow reform society so there would be no nee for money laundering in the first place because we've eradicated criminal enterprise in the first place?

I'll be the first to admit I don't have an answer for you. I'd say I wonder if the downvoters do, but I think we both know the answer to that.

This does not bode well for your moral high ground

At the bare minimum you should realize that any KYC’d individual can convert billions of dollars of crypto to US Dollars in a day without moving the markets more than a few percent

and after that you should realize that classifying a transaction as clean is not difficult

But if you don't want any transaction associated with anyone’s identity it is simply more time consuming, eventually you are still getting to a KYC’d individual that can receive a wire transfer in dollars at any meaningful amount in a day

And finally, you can try to reread what I wrote earlier, jot the steps down on a napkin if you need to, its not that complicated you are just starting from a place that assumes an omniscient state and a culture of stigmatizing the movement of money, and thats just flawed

In Europe I could sell cryptocurrency for cash at a price several % above market value, people are desperate to get rid of paper money.

It’s only a bit challenging if you want money in your bank account.

Those other entities are businesses. If they want to conduct business in the US, they have to abide by the local laws. Just like any US business has to abide by EU laws if they want to operate in EU.

>If a US regulatory agency doesn't want its residents to interact with foreign websites, it should block their internet access to websites outside of the country.

US is literally acting in the interests of the business here trying to help them. US could block Binance, sure. But I think it is more merciful of them to give Binance a chance to fix their shit up and still let them operate in the US. Blocking those website is the last resort, as it should be.

Also, again, no one forced Binance US to register as a legal business entity in the US and conduct business here. Binance US is supposed to operate within US laws. It is their dedicated US branch for US customers that is supposed to provide services legal in the US (no derivatives, as opposed to their non-US Binance platform). Except they, allegedly, let some stuff from the non-US branch that is illegal in the US to slip through to the US customers. Binance cannot have their cake and eat it too. They either don't operate in the US or they do so while abiding the law.