Mixers never fail to astonish me. They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering. They are marketed as a way to wash illicit funds. And then the folks who run them get mad when law enforcement tries to shut them down?
That's the facade. In my experience, Bitcoin is still the main ecoin demanded in phishing/ransomware incidents, even when more privacy-friendly ecoins exist. A tumbler's purpose is distorting Bitcoin's public blockchain (one of its core tenets), and that's very attractive to criminals.
Mixers aren’t banned. A mixer that was used to launder money by North Korea was.
Banks which collect KYC and respond to criminal probes. Those that don’t absolutely get sanctioned.
Well, it's not banned, but over $10k USD in cash you need to fill out an IRS form 8300 [1] precisely to curb criminal use of cash. (Although I'd argue it should be upped and pegged to inflation as 10k isn't what 10k used to be.)
[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Edit: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States for NFA. Thanks below for Leary.
I think the 5th has been restricted enough by the courts that it literally only matters if you EXPLICITLY invoke it. (At least this is my understanding of Berghuis v. Thompkins.)
Similar for the NFA case - they can't get then for the failure to register, but they can still get them for manufacturing/possessing it (especially since it was amended after the ruling).
>they can't get then for the failure to register
A criminal filing an 8300 would be effectively "registering" their illegally owned money, including the source from who the money is received.
"and that you couldn't pay that tax without registering"
The form 8300 actually requires you to state both counterparties of the illegal transaction, which goes well within furnishing evidence useful in incriminating yourself. It's far more incriminating than the annual tax return, which shows an aggregate yearly amount rather than granularity of single transaction (or collection of "associated"-transaction) along with the date and name of both counterparties and a host of other details.
Honestly, why can't we just have the government know every single website we visit immediately? We all have nothing to hide
If a VPN is used to help North Korea, and the developers won’t or can’t shut it down, yes, it will be sanctioned. More broadly, speech is generally protected under U.S. law in a way financial transactions are not.
Obscuring the source of a transaction is not always money laundering.
My credit card would suck if everyone I did business with knew about all my present and future transactions too.
Or if your employer pays you, and decides to kick you out because he doesn’t agree with some transactions you made?
It is always the same charade in which a government tells you that by banning x they will solve y. Or that by removing any form of privacy to everyone (but themselves) they will solve y.
In the end they never solve it, even worse the people in charge of the surveillance (banks in this instance for money laundering) are repeatedly caught actively taking part in the laundering and they occasionally get punished by "fines" that are rarely enough to discourage them from continuing.
So people want to take their privacy back now and tear down means ridiculous theatricals we call AML/KYC/KYB procedures. Obviously governments aren't happy, they are welcome to try to stop us.
The same is true with all the loto and gambling crypto sites. They run without any oversight and are blatantly breaking the law.
North Korean sanctions [1]. As well as virtually every jurisdiction’s AML laws. (Specifically, American and Dutch.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_North_Kore...
How is HN so consistently cryptophobic?
Imagine the reaction you’d get here suggesting say, E2EE is “explicitly a product for {crime}”. You’d be rightly mocked, but throw in crypto and it’s like 75% of the people here lose basic reasoning skills. I’d be less frustrated if it wasn’t so common.
Mixers are designed to facilitate money laundering. You can claim it’s for legitimate privacy, etc but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s money laundering.
A mixer concealing the public address of clean money is not nefarious in any way and should be perfectly legal.
For E2EE,you describe the base level capability: Secure message between two parties.
For Mixers, you describe an act that the capability of making money hard to trace enables: Money laundering. If you applied a similar argument to E2EE (as many have and will keep doing), encrypted communications are a way for people to do illegal things away from the eyes of the law. Trade illegal items, send banned/illegal/questionable content, etc.
From a pure capability standpoint, mixers, like E2EE, are a way to secure XYZ activity (Which happens to be money transfer) from prying eyes.
You're drawing a distinction between illicit and privacy-seeking transaction and I'm saying the act of obscuring the source is all that matters.
It should be shut down.