Hacker News Reader

Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the money laundering theory. There are a hundred liquid crypto assets to use for that. Big NFTs are high visibility and worthless so it’s the worst of all worlds

View on HN

It's because there's no price, so you can use it to justify money that came from elsewhere. Like if I made a million dollars selling drugs, I can put up an NFT, create a straw buyer (really me) who buys it from me for a million dollars, and now my black money has turned into white money.

Where does straw buyer convert the ill-gotten cash to nice clean electronic currency? That's what AML/KYC is intended to prevent.

How are you going to prove that it was earned fairly? Easy to do with nfts, anonymous buyer, price highly variable. Just like with normal artwork

Yes in fact artwork has traditionally been used for this sort of thing as well. It's the kind of thing that could sell for a million dollars, without any way for an outsider to determine that this is a fair price. NFTs just supercharge this dynamic.

Exactly. There isn't enough artwork that has enough value. NFTs create "artwork" out of (almost) nowhere to satisfy the limited market of people with too much money to hide or wash.

I've always said the best money-laundering / money-stashing instrument are paintings in a rugged floating tube that can be stashed in a yacht equipped with salt plugs in-case it ever went down.

I'd agree with this, while it may be possible, if you can already launder the coins just stick with that and forget about the NFT angle which would just be more surface area for a mistake.

You can tumble coins so they can't be associated with the dirty wallet they're from, but that doesn't explain how you ended up with the coins. "someone sent me a million dollars of crypto for no reason" isn't very believable. "someone bought my NFT" is less unreasoable.

The tumbling thing has yet to keep anyone out of jail as far as I know, and the origin of the money you better hope was as careful? I dunno. I see what you're saying, but a lot of crime tries to be two sets of books or whatever and they still go to jail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com