Right now, what's happening is a few mega power brokers are traceable, unaccountable, and untouchable by the people. Pretending that crypto somehow creates or enables crime when its sitting right under our noses (as our governments refuse to do anything about it), is frankly ridiculous.

- Traditional sources actually at least try and stop it from happening.

They helped Mexican drug gangs launder $378 billions for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...

And they just get slapped with a small fee, then continue with the same behavior.

- We agree money laundering is bad.

- We agree that the existing system is attempting to solve the problem, but isn't always effective.

- You're saying: throw it all out and let anyone launder anything they want.

- I'm saying that's strictly worse. Let's shore up the existing system and try and take it on.

And the argument is that there comes a point when the drawbacks of trying to stop it becomes larger than the benefits we gain, and we should therefore do something else that gives us more benefits.

You might argue that we're not there yet, which is fine, but others will argue that it's time to try something else.

But can we agree that trying "nothing" isn't better?

By doing "nothing", we gain other things such as financial privacy for everyone and making digital payments available for everyone. These are not insignificant things and if they're more valuable than the inefficient anti-laundering attempts then doing "nothing" would indeed be better.

Also we wouldn't truly be doing "nothing", we would only give up one traceability component and we can still chase crime in other ways, like requiring documents of where you got the money to buy this mansion.

Basically traditional sources just incentivize organized crime that's less accountable to the justice system until they piss off the wrong people. Look at Deutsche bank.

Once you grow that large, you get a lot of attention and suddenly it is economical to track you down, even if you are using 'untraceable' currency like Monero.

When you are a 'small' player, buying or selling small quantities of cannabis, it isn't worth the time to trace your transactions. The Justice Department is targeting everything, not just big-time criminals.

This seems like a prelude to a burdensome requirement for platforms to make it easier to execute warrants for crimes using cryptocurrency, which will sweep up everyone.