Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob33212 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many bitcoin people understand the history of banking regulations. Banks do not want to be accessory to crimes. They make plenty of money legally. So when the government says we know that you helped someone steal billions of dollars so we are going to shut you down, the banks will quickly offer to track and report and block people.

View on HN

Banks are the most law breaking entities in the United States. They constantly have to make enormous settlements for the insane number of laws they break. These are just the settlements for Bank of America:

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/01/the-comple...

A better summary wouldn't be "they make plenty of money legally." It would be they make plenty of money illegally after paying the settlements.

None of these fines are about laundering money.

Also, showing these fines is a long way from "the most law breaking entities".

I do believe Wells Fargo got in trouble for helping launder money - and they spent a LOT of money to help fix it.

HSBC then.

> HSBC Holdings Plc agreed to pay a record $1.92 billion in fines to U.S. authorities for allowing itself to be used to launder a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico and other banking lapses.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe-idUSBRE8BA05M2...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-05/ubs-may-u...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54597256

I could keep Googling but that should cover your complaints about laundering money.

Forgive my vagueness- I wasn't complaining that banks don't launder money - only that the original links didn't support that thesis. You have rectified that.

Do you also claim that banks are the biggest thieves?

Biggest source of theft in the US is wage theft by employers.

Wait.. really? I'd love to dive into some of those numbers. I'm not saying you are wrong - otoh, I want to see if I can screen for behaviors that are preparatory.

Yeah but they break those laws for their own gain, not for you.

This is what I'm saying. The banks are more than happy to pay fines and add regulations to their practices because they don't want the government to shut them down. Coinbase will be no different. They make too much money to have any principals around standing up for a "Permissionless and Decentralized financial system"

What? Banks lobby heavily against regulation and their lobbyists write the regulations that do exist. They also often commit crimes themselves, are accessories to others, and work in grey areas. This seems well known.

And when a corrupt federal agent asks a bank to delete records, because they’re allegedly part of a secret investigation, they also comply. This happened in the Silk Road case, but the immutability of the Bitcoin blockchain revealed their transactions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com