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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

> There were no victims.

"Terrorist Financing. Binance failed to report to FinCEN transactions associated with terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Ransomware. Despite being one of the largest receivers of ransomware proceeds, and transacting in millions of dollars of ransomware proceeds from attacks involving at least 24 different strains of ransomware, Binance failed to report these transactions.

Child Sexual Abuse Materials. Binance never reported transactions with websites devoted to selling child sexual abuse materials, including Dark Scandals."

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Finance is in a somewhat unique place in that we hold them responsible for their customers. If a bank doesn't ask any questions and as a consequence provides service to known terrorists that's against their perceived (and codified) obligations. Yet the we allow anyone to ride the subway, to get a telephone connection, or to have their home hooked up to electricity. If your internet provider terminated your contract because you download files from Syria or regularly upload large files and trigger their risk analysis that would be seen as outrageous. Yet that is exactly what we expect of finance companies.

You say it’s a unique place, but here’s the thing: it actually undergirds all of those other services.

Telephones/internet/elecricity are quite hard to regularly get without access to the traditional banking system. Possible, yes, but very annoying. Which is the point.

Some would argue it is only because of the security of the banking system that these other utilities are allowed to be “””free”””.

> Finance is in a somewhat unique place in that we hold them responsible for their customers. If a bank doesn't ask any questions and as a consequence provides service to known terrorists that's against their perceived (and codified) obligations.

Is this really unique? Because afaik, if you were “just a taxi driver doing their job and not asking questions”, you could easily end up being charged as a getaway driver.

I think if you want to sell chemicals, explosives, or guns, you're going to have to keep records on your customers, and may have to do some level of vetting before the sale, depending on the product and jurisdiction within the US.

The US government also issues cash.

Cash does facilitate crimes. Yet we consider that a cost or a bug, one we're willing to accept in exchange for its benefits. Cash itself is clearly a neutral tool, yet even it is regulated if transactions exceed certain thresholds.

The problem with this line of reasoning by itself, is that it justifies some policies we like but also other policies we don't like. (For example, almost no one wants background checks or KYC laws for buying a computer.) Assuming we're not cartoonish totalitarians, we counterbalance the concept of indirect victimhood with some other concept of privacy or liberty or something. But that's where all the hardest questions come up.

"Terrorist Financing, Ransomware and Child Sexual Abuse Materials": none of those crimes were committed by Binance. And I bet those actual criminals all used cash or WhatsApp at some point. Maybe even McDonald.

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