The US has regulations around banks knowing their customers and being responsible about things like this. For better or worse, those regulations have in many ways "leaked" into the regulations of other countries, because the US makes many of them mandatory in order to get access to the US financial system, which most countries see as essential.

Sure, there might be places where you could convert that Bitcoin into a local fiat currency, but then what? You have US$7.5B denominated in some random fiat currency that is likely mostly cut off from the "main" transactable currencies of the world. You'd have to find ways to slowly launder it and convert it into something else. Doable, I guess, and maybe worth the time and effort considering you can't do anything with the money otherwise, at least not without getting caught. But doing all that is risky as well... make a mistake and you could get caught.

I'm pretty sure there's no bank in the world that would be willing to make a transaction in the billions and not keep a record of it.

Ye of little faith. Google: HSBC cartel money.

HSBC knew what they were doing.... Because of their records.

“The confidential records and interviews with former employees reveal that compliance officers often filed SARs lacking even basic information about who owned companies banking with HSBC, the nature of their businesses, and where the money came from. Sometimes, records show, they asked branches for the information and were ignored or rebuffed.”

There’s records and then there’s “records”.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...

And the record of not having a proper record.

So we’re good? A record of a record (of a record of a record of a...) that doesn’t tell you who the money went to, doesn’t fill in that blank. It’s useful to ascertain fault at the bank (which in HSBC’s case didn’t result in much of consequence ).

So yes records (of sometimes dubious quality) are kept from a pedantic standpoint, but I understood GP to mean that this would prevent someone from laundering large sums through (large respectable) banks which is demonstrably not always the case.

Not only may these logs be questionable, but apparently the penalties, using the HSBC example, don’t seem to be a deterrent.

TLDR; banks having records doesn’t mean shit when you want to launder large sums of money.

You're probably right. I was thinking of the usual suspects when it comes to offshore accounts but also Switzerland with historically very strong privacy laws. But I'm know nothing about the banking industry so I could be totally off here.

Even Switzerland eventually bent to pressure from the United States:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443713704577601...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324412604578512...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-MBB-23415

that's about 750,000 times what banks have to track. I think anything over $10k must be tracked or groups of transactions that are linked that are at/over that.

Anything over $10k must be reported. Or anything that "looks suspicious". Or anything that "looks like it is trying to subvert the $10k rule"