Is there a presumption of innocence or guilt? Which do you prefer?
It's also important to consider that “innocence or guilt” is not the right framing here because a bank verifying ID is not an accusation of crime but making sure that the information is available should accusations arise.
Was someone making the assertion that money laundering using one medium is (generally) victimless while money laundering using a different medium is not?
Can you explain or clarify for me why you believe that is the argument made? I re-read the thread back to original post and I don't understand why you say so.
> These are generally (although not always) victimless crimes.
That claim seems wildly incompatible with what we have seen with ransomware, the scale of money going to countries like North Korea or Russia, people’s holdings being stolen, etc.
My position is that cryptocurrencies should be held to the same standard as everything else, and found the argument that the improved rigor is unnecessary due to low harm rates unconvincing.
Where I take issue with this is where you call for "the same standard as everything else". The surveillance of cryptocurrency right now is actually very pervasive.
I've seen the theft of millions of dollars in fraudulent wire transfers (I mean 1M+ per incident) in the traditional banking system over and over and over again, no cryptocurrency involved whatsoever. And contrary to what people often say, it's not actually an option for victims to reverse such transactions.
Thus, I personally doubt this surveillance is effective in preventing theft. We are better off spending the resources to harden against these attacks in the first place. I don't think it's worth it overall to engage in the pervasive surveillance of cryptocurrency or traditional bank transactions, unless the goal is something else, such as collecting more taxes or preventing flight of capital, which is what I believe the real fear about cryptocurrency is.
And notwithstanding the above, I have to ask, is it really a good idea to presume guilt and require permission for people to transact with each other in a general sense? And if you do believe this is for the greater good, why not expand the scope of it? Why not put cameras in all of our homes? We have the technology to implement this now, so why not?
Child endangerment, for example. You can be arrested for leaving a pistol in a child's crib, even if they don't shoot anyone with it. Causing the potential danger is the crime.
Banks should have the presumption that collecting KYC information like addresses/names recklessly endangers the children of their clients by exposing their information to officers with guns who are known to harm children when serving warrants.
> if they had to use the traditional banking system there are multiple chokepoints which made it much harder to get and keep significant sums that way
And no one at all would be able to sneak money through banking system if the government just executed anyone using a bank!
No, in the sense that when you are telling people to leave an existing process which has safeguards you are then taking on the responsibility for not causing a regression in the level of protection.
Breathing air isn’t a good comparison because it doesn’t have the primary purpose of evading oversight. More appropriate comparisons do: cash, wire transfers, store credit, etc. all have restrictions to curtail criminal activity because we know that it is otherwise inevitable. Unless you can show that all use of cryptocurrency is benign we have to assume that it will follow every other financial system in human history and be used for a mix of purposes, and thus require the same mitigations.
So prove you're innocent.
Yeah no thanks. I hope crypto finds a way to totally squash warrantless search of your documents (AKA KYC) to engage in finance.
Cryptocurrency does not have those safeguards and is famously popular for all kinds of criminal activities so it’s hard to take seriously the assertion that it’s all victimless and doesn’t need the same countermeasures.
That one can transfer $50k worth of something like XMR, seemingly anonymously, is the entire point. You get your 4th amendment rights back.
If you want to argue that your bank checking ID is an illegal search, feel free to contact your elected representative.
The violation wasn't money laundering the violation was not putting into place state mandated guards to impose AML compliance and the appropriate (arguably unconstitutional) searches.