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So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
No, we don't have any of that here.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
Also, Chat control has almost been passed twice by now.
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
Sob stories about companies being forced to reckon with their unethical business practices in the face of new laws are nothing new. Companies that profit from playing fast and loose with people's personal data complain about the hardships of following GDPR, food companies complain that the limits for cancer-causing chemicals and heavy metals are too low, and factories complain that they should be allowed to dump toxic waste in the rivers.
And employees working for those companies often pick up these sorts of irrational views by osmosis to preserve social cohesion within the company.