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Comment by csdreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

If you can shift these tokens around like Bitcoin my first thought was tax or sanctions evasion. Buy some VOO tokens from a 3rd party since you know your corrupt government (and you made money from that corruption) will seize your bank account for any reason. You hold these tokens in a private wallet stored somewhere for a few decades as your escape plan.

There was an article on how cut-throat (pun intended) low the margins are for money laundering in the competition between businesses to get drug trafficked US dollars from Mexico to China.

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If you don't trust your own government, but the US government and financial institutions, couldn't you just open a US brokerage account?

And conversely, if the US government doesn't want you as a shareholder (and by extension US financial institutions can't serve you), good luck to anyone trying to (knowingly or negligently) redeem any VOO that you've touched.

Governments are more practiced at blocking money from moving around with traditional services like banks with crypto they have a tougher time locking down the avenues because anyone offering $LOCAL_CURRENCY to crypto is a place money can leak out of the country around traditional money controls.

There's a reason real estate is one of the more popular ways for chinese nationals to move large amounts of money abroad, it's one of the less restricted ways to move large sums of money out of the country. So there's a lot of interest in expensive real estate not for occupation but just to buy to get cash out of the country into a stable asset that can be sold or borrowed against.

Yes, it'll definitely take them some time to catch up, and currently the pendulum is swinging in the other direction, but as soon as a critical mass of retail investors get burned, I predict that they'll quickly figure it out.

I would have thought the massive proliferation of scam coin rug pulls would have done it but then the US elected a president who did his own crypto pump and dump rug pull right before his own inauguration so I doubt we'll see any real action against them for the next 3.5+ years.

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