Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

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I hate banks as much as anyone but... The concept of "money laundering" is a fabricated offense that shouldn't even exist. It basically shifts the duties of law enforcement onto private businesses and individuals. The expectation for bankers or real estate agents to uncover criminals when the police struggle to do so is unreasonable and doesn't make sense. Sure they should cooperate with police investigations but they shouldn't be leading them. Additionally, private businesses are not subject to the same legal principles such as the presumption of innocence and due process, leading to countless individuals being denied access to basic banking services based on perceived risk[0]. To top it off, those laws are ineffective and very costly to implement[1].

[0] There is an estimated 1,400,000,000 unbanked people worldwide (a good chunk of which are denied access on the basis of risk and/or lack of satisfying identification).

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-...

I don't think you answered the question. If I facilitate a drug cartel moving kilograms of cocaine, I'll be in jail until I'm very old. If a bank knowingly facilitates the same outcome through different means, why doesn't anyone at the bank face the same charges?

What you're saying is that even though money laundering is necessary for drug cartel operations, it shouldn't be a crime (or should be a much lesser crime). So if I carry the drugs across state lines, even if I put in the same abstract amount of effort to completing a drug trade as the folks at the bank laundering money, my crime is worse?

There is the obvious argument that neither of these should be real crimes. But the fact remains that today in the world that exists, one group of people that facilitate drug cartel operations are punished much more harshly than another group. The disparity in punishment is what the parent comment is remarking on.

You bring up a fascinating aspect of money which I like to contemplate about often.

Money is the pure abstraction in the sense that it hides just about everything that brought it into existence. If I look at two $100 bills they are exactly the same; theoretically and practically. And yet they couldn't possibly be similar, they could have originated in crimes, be parts of legitimate businesses, so on and so forth. But they still continue to exist as pure abstraction. One could get into all sorts of philosophical rabbit holes.

What sorts of arguments would have had at the cusp of using coins?

I think you'd find David Graeber's book Debt very interesting. There are a bunch of common assumptions about how money came into existence that simply aren't what happened based on the archeological record.

Coinage came a lot later than basic debt ledgers, and it was largely an organizational hack by rulers to feed and house their armies. They'd mint coins with their face as seal or whatever, and would issue these to the soldiers as payment, while also requiring all citizens to pay a tax in those same coins. Suddenly everyone is figuring out how to give the soldiers what they want without you having to organize any of it directly.

You didn't mention it explicitly so just in case you didn't know, what you are describing is called fungibility[0] and is indeed an important property of money.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

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