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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

"far right money-laundering"

... what? Is this a new conspiracy theory I'm not aware of?

There was some recent news article about this. I think it is not unreasonable take, because obviously crypto is safer to use for fringe groups than Visa or Paypal. But I agree the wording is way too hysterical, that is a bad sign.

I'm not from the anglosphere. Google does not spit out anything useful to me. What did happen? I still don't know what you are talking about.

Regarding this week's SPLC report:

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/585306-bitcoin-surge-a...

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/12/08/bitcoin-adoption-am...

https://gizmodo.com/far-right-leaders-are-raking-in-millions...

A random sample of previous coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/bitcoi...

https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-international-news-...

https://decrypt.co/80971/far-right-conspiracist-sent-60000-b...

The 6 articles you linked neither mention money laundering, nor describe something that qualifies (in my understanding) as money laundering.

The original post did not use money laundering in the legal sense but in the ordinary language use sense of the phrase.

Don't bullshit me, we both know it was written with defamatory intent, and it turned out its not substantiable. Its slander.

...which means what? This seems like an odd equivocation. Is money laundering the newest term to get a new, politically useful definition?

I mean, 'money laundering' is a very different thing from 'using a different payment protocol because you've been banned from conventional ones'.

I'm not at all right-wing, but it sets a dangerous precedent to establish 'acceptable' payment protocols run by the dominant monopolies, then ban people whom you don't like, and baselessly accuse them of 'money laundering' when they (obviously) go somewhere else.

David Golumbia has written a book called “The Politics of Bitcoin - Software as Right-Wing Extremism” which goes into the connection between cryptocurrency and far-right ideology. Here is an interview with him: https://overcast.fm/+ZpQA7ciS0

Any US personnel dependent on the academic system writing about anything remotely political or social sciences related (i.e. anything mathematically unverifiable) cannot be trusted as any kind of authority (in the current era). The rabid left-wing student organizations will destroy their livelihood on the smallest whim if their stance is "wrong".

I think there's an idea that if someone is thought to have a certain set of beliefs they should be refused basic services such as the ability to store/transfer/receive value and the ability to earn a living. So if something enables them to have these basic services, it's a grave threat.

According to the president of the US, the ideology is the deadliest threat to the US. So keeping money out of the hands of people thought to be sympathetic to the cause is vital.

> "We won't ignore what our intelligence agencies have determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today: White supremacy is terrorism," Biden said. "We're not going to ignore that either."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-supremacy-most...

It's not just far-right either. Cryptocurrency, despite its appearance of full traceability and transparency, provides an incredibly easy method for money laundering in the long term and has been used to do so by every side. Many communist countries utilize cryptocurrency to perform transactions outside international trade law, bypassing blockades and sanctions normally enforced by banks, foreign offices, and physical blockade. Criminals of course love the damn thing, hackers especially. The technology is good but it has so many bad uses that it's still a real ethical gray area for a lot of people. Not to mention the countless scams profiting off people who don't know any better and literally advertised and peddled by modern mass media.

It's literally problems with cash, scaled up to the extent that they become a qualitatively new problem due to the sheer ease and low risk of shifting money.

I wonder if it's even morally consistent to take the view they cash is fine, but cryptocurrency isn't.

Cash seems a lot better for crime, except for international use. "There should be no international cash equivalent" - would you agree with this?

Ransomware operations rarely request cash payments, to note one example.

If your M.O. is to commit crime at a distance, cryptocurrency is ... gold.

Cash is perhaps a little more traceable than cryptocurrency is since most ways it is passed around is in one way or another linked to the physical world and to your actual existence. You can however launder cryptocurrency without leaving your room and without ever being linked to any of that once you slowly bleed it out into cash. The only point at which your physical being comes close to anything traceable is once it's so white the NSA couldn't catch you. And frequently, they don't. Because as said before, it's an international issue.

DPRK often does some money borrowing from the less tech-savvy users out in the west. That money goes into buying that government all kinds of stuff, both abroad and even for the actual physical country itself. Cuba dances around the US blockade with cryptocurrencies. Both of these are of supreme interest to national security agencies in the US. Yet none of them have managed to really get a proper hold on these operations.

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