>> but how have we always just accepted the lack of personal privacy when it comes to finance?
>We didn't. This is something that has changed in the UK in my lifetime. Unless you were the subject of an investigation you didn't have to provide much detail to the tax authorities, and what you did provide was kept strictly separate from other areas of government.
>There was an attempt to strike a balance with the emphasis on privacy. Nowadays the government thinks it is entitled to all the data all the time.
I agree it's valid not to use a bank; one could try to conduct all one's business in cash. But in practice, people doing that are often doing something criminal, so people using cryptocurrency should not be surprised that they end up being treated with the same level of scrutiny as people running around with briefcases of cash. That is to say, their attempts at secrecy may result in a practical loss of privacy.
A reasonable check and balance would be the requirement for the state to get a warrant, issued by a court when probable cause is found, not 'every transaction over $10,000 is reported to the state for its warrantless mass-surveillance system'.
The $10,000 threshold was set in 1970, when factoring in inflation, it was $70,000 of today's money, and when average income was lower, making its application more seldom still.
The dragnet steadily catches more and more transactions from the twin trends of rising real incomes and inflation reducing the real value of the threshold.
We should oppose warrantless mass-surveillance of private financial transactions for the same reasons we oppose mass-surveillance of every one's private communications. The desire to live free from crime does not justify engaging in either.
I think most would agree, and that AML laws are only instituted due to:
1. the complexity of the subject matter obfuscating what these laws do
2. the euphemization of AML laws by the AML industry, like calling them anti-money laundering laws rather than the more descriptive 'financial surveillance laws', and
3. the stigmatization of money, as a result of the public relations efforts of the many who stand to gain from laws restricting people's ability to transact with it.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/de0sys/kyc_is_abs...
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/money-reimagined-ugly-side-kyc-aml-...
[3] https://twitter.com/SpencerKSchiff/status/125276128577685913...
What you are describing as a right: the ability to subject others to warrantless mass-surveillance, violates the core liberal principle of Western culture, namely the rights to privacy and the presumption of innocence.
And for good reason. There is no evidence at all that abrogating these core rights makes people safer, either from threats in general, or specifically from crime.
There are occasions where society's interest in preventing crime outweighs personal privacy, and one way to look at that is that when something (like, say, ransomware) has an effect on other people, it can no longer be reasonably called private. When that happens, as long as there are reasonable checks and balances, I'm fine with banks giving out information, especially when it's organizations that generally respect the privacy of the people involved.