How far does it go? Invade other countries to spread democracy and rule of law?

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.

You're getting downvoted but you're right. Ideally, we'd live in a world where highly sophisticated multinational cartel like entities don't regularly abuse markets to launder their ill gotten gains and finance their operations.

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.

And who protects the world from the US when they inevitably play kingmaker in a foreign country again? Quite a few despotic regimes saw their beginnings in US meddling.

Did you know the US is the biggest money launderer jurisdiction in the world?

This does not bode well for your moral high ground

Yep. Ironically, BTC mixers seem like they'd be quite poor at the job of actually mixing because unlike more sophisticated looking layering activity, it doesn't actually mimic legitimate transaction activity which could otherwise slip under the radar. On the contrary, it sticks out like a sore thumb and because the blockchain is immutable, has been used by the authorities to trace less sophisticated actors.

Its not and for you to write that you didn't really visualize what I described

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

I just collected one million AED (~270k usd) from a localbitcoins exchanger. This cost me nothing, the guy didn’t even ask for my name.

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.