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Comment by Jochim | Hacker News Reader

Should your bank prevent you from spending that pound if the transaction is for something illicit? If your bank knows you've stolen that pound being used to purchase a legal good/service, should they allow you to spend it?

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The obvious answer here is that it's not up to the bank to enforce the law. They should not intentionally assist you in breaking the law, but neither should they go out of their way to discover or prevent it. How customers spend their money is none of the bank's business but if law enforcement shows up to investigate someone then they should cooperate.

Meanwhile, those who have had the pleasure of begging for bank statements with the 'contra' entries [who the money came from/went to] that allow investigators to follow the money trail, have, almost to a man, concluded that they must be in on the crime.

To be fair, we may well need better enforcement of existing regulations. I still don't want my bank playing the role of law enforcement though.

My bank is a place I store money when not using it.. so that it's not in my house or at risk of being stolen. The fact I use the bank as a utility to also spend that money is unfortunate. Thank God (Satoshi) for crypto so that I can spend my money without needing a bank to allow it.

Just a reminder: you don’t need satoshi to spend your money wherever you want. You can just withdraw it from your bank as cash first.

Just think this freedom has existed for thousands of years without the need to burn up the planet with meaningless computations as a prerequisite.

In Australia they have moved to BSB cash transactions over $10K, with a stated goal of becoming a cashless society. I wouldn't be so sure this will always be an option.

Since when can you withdraw cash and then spend it online? You can't. That is what Bitcoin solved.

It didn't solve it. We could have anonymous payment intermediaries today if we wanted. We don't want them because of the massive amounts of money that would be laundered through them.

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