Crypto must end anonymity for illicit finance, U.S. regulator says | Hacker News Reader

Crypto must end anonymity for illicit finance, U.S. regulator says

reuters.com

23 pointsdev_tty0126 comments

What's great with this is that you can spy on your political opposition, and jail any dissident trying to raise funds for their cause. China is already doing it in Hong Kong: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/06/17/cryptos-connecti...

The FATF and its minions are the harbingers of the authoritarian world of tomorrow.

Define "illicit finance". Like stuff that US can't tax? how "illicit" of it!

Yes, correct, if you are utilizing resources the American public pays for to run your business (such as the amenity of a safe and invasion-proof geography) then not paying for your consumption is illicit.

Haha, I'm pretty sure that "safe and invasion-proof geography" is stolen property. It's always funny when statists try and pretend national sovereignty or law is more than having a big enough stick to force everyone else within a certain area to obey them.

Well, a democratic government is quite different than just who has the biggest stick. But in any case, I was just clarifying for OP that yes, the American people do get to define "illicit" and we do it in the way s/he is describing.

Yea, colonizers democratically genocided Native Americans

Yeah yeah yeah. History is extremely ugly, and the history of the Americas is certainly among the horrors.

It’s a very lame argument for not paying taxes though.

I don't think he was arguing against paying taxes, I think he was arguing that there are _some_ transactions which it is reasonable to expect both a level of privacy, as well as obscurity to the government for purposes of dissent or lack of relevant jurisdiction (private, ad-hoc transactions are still a thing).

e.g. purchasing large amount of print materials / equipment or other distribution tools that are then flagged / targeted by a less than agreeable local political group to repress participation

While federal laws "sound" nice, enforcement and targeting of most laws are still done by local, less arguably democratic practices

I was commenting on the absurdity that I perceive in the preceding comments. One person spoke about the "safe, invasion-proof" geography being stolen and the next person says that democracy is more than having a big stick. I'm agreeing with the person who said that it was stolen and that stealing had nothing to do with democracy

I can add to this though that in a capitalist and supposed democratic state the majority theoretically has the stick but in reality the money has the stick, it was the same when colonists arrived in the US

All laws in the end are enforced by the threat of violence. But in reality the laws don't matter a whole lot of you storm in with enough gunpower, hence the genocide

Hear, hear

It obviously wasn't invasion proof when the Europeans came.

I think everyone is well aware that national sovereignty depends on military might, and likewise that the land was forcefully taken from others. No one was pretending what you claim.

I'm not using a 4 billion dollar train in California but looks like I'm going to be paying for it.

Is it reasonable that some bureaucrats in the United States, or bureaucrats of any other government, have the right to not only surveil but also approve or deny the transfer of money between any two humans on planet Earth?

It may be unreasonable, but the US already does it's best to oversee all USD-nominated electronic money transfers in the world. It's a tremendous source of information about the economics of the other countries.

They can only attack the crypto exchanges, which will hurt it plenty. But they're powerless to do anything else other than create propaganda. You can't ban a number(crypto wallet private key).

Far more likely that major crypto networks implement native privacy when feasible

Have fun going back to subpoenas and audits after identifying the specific individual or organization to target, what a concept

Crypto isn’t anonymous. Governments and private companies have ways of identifying you. After reading the book Tracers in the Dark, crypto isn’t so anonymous anymore to me.

What does the book say about Monero?

This is just a manifestation of the Total Information Awareness agenda - which aims for warrantless mass-surveillance over all private communications - applied to finance.

There's no evidence that AML/KYC laws reduce crime:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339486326_Anti-mone...

The effect that they do have is to massively shift the balance of power toward those employed by the state, and away from private citizens at large.

Justice Douglas, in his dissenting opinion on the 1974 California Bankers Association v Shultz case that upheld the constitutionality of the Bank Secrecy Act, provided an excellent argument against warrantless mass-surveillance of monetary transactions:

It is estimated that a minimum of 20 billion checks - and perhaps 30 billion - will have to be photocopied and that the weight of these little pieces of paper will approximate 166 million pounds a year. 6

It would be highly useful to governmental espionage to have like reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware [416 U.S. 21, 85] and retail stores, all our drugstores. These records too might be "useful" in criminal investigations.

One's reading habits furnish telltale clues to those who are bent on bending us to one point of view. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals. A mandatory recording of all telephone conversations would be better than the recording of checks under the Bank Secrecy Act, if Big Brother is to have his way. The records of checks - now available to the investigators - are highly useful. In a sense a person is defined by the checks he writes. By examining them the agents get to know his doctors, lawyers, creditors, political allies, social connections, religious affiliation, educational interests, the papers and magazines he reads, and so on ad infinitum. These are all tied to one's social security number; and now that we have the data banks, these other items will enrich that storehouse and make it possible for a bureaucrat - by pushing one button - to get in an instant the names of the 190 million Americans who are subversives or potential and likely candidates.

It is, I submit, sheer nonsense to agree with the Secretary that all bank records of every citizen "have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory investigations or proceedings." That is unadulterated nonsense unless we are to assume that every citizen is a crook, an assumption I cannot make.

Since the banking transactions of an individual give a fairly accurate account of his religion, ideology, opinions, and interests, a regulation impounding them and making them automatically available to all federal investigative agencies is a sledge-hammer approach to a problem that only a delicate scalpel can manage. Where fundamental personal rights are involved - as is true when as here the [416 U.S. 21, 86] Government gets large access to one's beliefs, ideas, politics, religion, cultural concerns, and the like - the Act should be "narrowly drawn" (Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 307 ) to meet the precise evil. 7 Bank accounts at times harbor criminal plans. But we only rush with the crowd when we vent on our banks and their customers the devastating and leveling requirements of the present Act. I am not yet ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch criminals.

But so far this slope has not been all that slippery in practice, has it?

Is this a serious comment?

It has anonymity, not for illicit finance, but for privacy.

You judge this as being conditional.

We don't.

Money used to be fully decentralized and private before it was digital and controlled by banking systems. I see it as just a return to that norm.

When was this? AFAICT currency was issued by centralized bodies and those bodies had audit rights over almost anyone who used that currency. Seems to be the case since currency was invented, and is sort of implied by e.g. monarchs’ faces being printed on the currency itself.

The currencies were denominated in gold or silver, which could hypothetically be melted down (if people chose), and the vast majority of transactions were not recorded or tracked.

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