> It is done by the likes of HSBC, Standard Chartered and other big banks.
This used to be the case. And undoubtedly it still goes on. There simply weren’t many other mechanisms to launder money that didn’t involve large banks…until crypto joined the party.
Crypto’s most popular feature is speculation, and its second most popular feature is money laundering/capital control evasion. These two probably encompass well in excess of 99% of typical real world use cases.
I'd be more than happy if controlling capital joined the list of things government just can't do. I think freely flowing capital is going to be good for everyone. Good luck to the crypto community & I'm sure a big chunk of the world trying to get away from unreasonable US sanctions will agree.
The US and 'west' is already financially liberal, so we can make an observation: it is NOT good for everyone. Capital flows freely, but it flows upwards. Trickle-down economics is proven false. Advocating for more liberal finances also means being okay with leaving people behind and in the shit; the unemployed, the homeless, the working poor, the huge percentage of people who constantly live one paycheck or one medical issue away from bankruptcy, the people who work 16 hours a day at multiple jobs and still can't make ends meet, etc etc etc.
I mean to rephrase your claim, yeah capital / money should flow freely, but egalitarian. The wealth of an individual should benefit all. The richest countries in the world shouldn't have poverty on an individual level. There shouldn't be a case where a handful of people have more money than half the world population.
And I get it, building a space company and launching yourself into space is cool, but that money could also have gone to your employees to lift them out of poverty and insecurity.
Capital controls aren't going to help the unemployed, the homeless, the working poor, the huge percentage of people who constantly live one paycheck or one medical issue away from bankruptcy. Capital controls will make those problems worse; forcing people to make bad decisions with their investments is not the fast track to getting great long term results.
There are capital controls and then there are capital controls - but preventing you from moving all of your money out of the country to avoid taxes is still a control on capital.
You mean the theory of...mathematics? More money in one place necessarily means less money in another.
If I sell a product for 100€ but only pay my worker 20€ to make it, I'm becoming rich. If my worker wants to buy that product, it costs them 5x their salary, but only costs me 1.4x. If all my CEO friends do the same for their products, the workers are becoming poor because of us becoming rich.
Now let's stop trying to be rich. Let's lower the margins and sell the product for 40€. Now it's 2x my salary (marginally worse for me), but also only 2x my worker's salary (much better for them). Let's say all of us CEOs do that. By not being rich, we've allowed our workers to be less poor.
Examples are basically any kind of crime and violence, traffic accidents, all kinds of things that harm people and societies.
Ya think ? People are indoctrinated from as soon as they start school. By the time they reach adulthood they are fully institutionalized.
You might not agree with every use of US financial might, but I do not think that a “big chunk” of the world are affected by US sanctions or that a big chunk disagree with US sanctions that exist. Most of these sanctions are against demonstrably hostile governments. The US isn’t perfect by any means, but cutting off NK, Iran, etc from international banking to extract nuclear compliance is, I think, a good use of sanctions.
It's the same side of the coin.
It's not like it's dominated by it - what makes us the largest part of crypto usage is speculative investors and bots. But as for the rest, it's clearly not normal people buying burgers, that's for sure.
> The public security ministry said that by Wednesday afternoon police had busted more than 170 criminal groups involved in using cryptocurrencies to launder money.
> China’s Payment & Clearing Association said on Wednesday that the number of crimes involving the use of virtual currencies is on the rise.
> Because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, convenient and global in nature, “they have increasingly become an important channel for cross-border money laundering,” the association said in a statement.
Sounds right to me.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/10/china-arrests-over-1100-susp...
Can you provide a source on that? I certainly don’t want any Tethers but I know plenty of people that do.
Remember only entities Tether deems as customers are permitted to redeem in the first place, and more than likely only the exchanges are deemed customers. They know they can't redeem anyways so they don't bother even trying. That's my read on it anyways.
Remember, the most trusted crypto exchange, Coinbase, wash traded 99% of all global Litecoin volume for a few months in 2016/2017. [2] And again, "exchanging" means nothing, because it's not a redemption. And the volume likely means nothing because it's probably just arb trades and wash trades.
95% of all crypto trading volume is fake. [3]
Nothing here is regulated. Take everything you see in crypto with a giant lump of salt.
Tether is a criminal enterprise [4], the fact that USDT is trading at 1:1 is an indication the market is completely untrustworthy, irrational or both - not that Tether is trustworthy. Be careful out there!
[1] https://wallet.tether.to/richlist
[2] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8369-21
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/26/1206/nearly-all-...
[4] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
I'm fully aware (and agree with) all your criticisms of Tether, my point is that if I had tens of millions in USDT (as many real people who aren't affiliated with Tether do) I could easily exchange it for USD.
I agree you could probably clear 10s of millions via USDT:USD pair, but I'm almost 100% confident you could not actually redeem them.
Sorry if I came across harsh btw, I appreciate your thoughts! Tone doesn't always carry well online and I'm actually a pretty positive person haha.
Totally agree you wouldn't be able to redeem it, I'm just saying the market seems to think 1 USDT = 1 USD. I honestly can't imagine they could keep that peg through manipulation..it would be astronomically expensive.
What we have observed is financial institutions failing with respect to KYC/AML/CFT/sanctions etc. (and getting fined for it), but that is not regulatory capture.
Also, I'd argue that since 2008 regulatory capture isn't working so well anymore, with a lot of extra regulation being thrown at the system (some of which being eased now again).
Regulators are incentivized to see dangers everywhere and acting accordingly. The last time they did not see dangers everywhere, it didn't work out so well, either. The counteracting force would come for electorates and policy makers seeing opportunity and progress lost from being overly cautious.
I am in favor of privacy and not having to explain what you choose to do with your own money, but imho the aggregate yield curve of total privacy inverts as you ascend a logarithmic scale.
> It is done by the likes of HSBC, Standard Chartered and other big banks.
> This is public knowledge, as we have seen with the Panama papers and most recently the FinCen files.
No. This is an observational bias. All we know is that they do that. But the fact that they do that, too, does not logically imply that resorting to them is the only way of money laundering and that BTC is not used for that a) at all b) at a much larger scale.
And, as it happens, because of the records, it has been discovered and everyone involved is traceable. The system works.
The system does not work.
Everyone involved have been discovered by `rouges` like Assange that system holds in jail for either made-up or largely irrelevant accusations, out of the scope of their opus, full soviet style.
Everyone knows the king is naked and just comedians and activists at large (or in jail) has courage to say something about it, which is pretty medieval position for all of us to start with.
https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...
It’s all public knowledge and pretty easy to find.
Instead they got fined for less than 0.1% of their total holdings.
The system doesn’t work. This is not a consequence.
1. Stop central bank imposed inflation.
2. Serve the people who are excluded from banking.
If either of those goals can't be reached, it is due to misdesign/inherent flaws of the approach and not governments.
[1] https://twitter.com/sergueyz/status/1365041519154061315
The amount of illicit transactioins is higher in bitcoin than in regular cash ($100 bills to be precise). I guess the same is for money laundering - amounts spent in legal transaactions going through current financial institutions will be much higher than money laundering there. And ratio between amounts of legal and possibly money laundering transactions will be higher for regular institutions than for bitcoin.
Precisely because of regulations and their absence.
Everyone knows where the real money laundering and terrorist financing happens.
It is done by the likes of HSBC, Standard Chartered and other big banks.
This is public knowledge, as we have seen with the Panama papers and most recently the FinCen files.
Our financial institutions are too rotten for you to even assume that the intention of this regulation is altruistic (i.e public benefit).
The tradition of regulation in finance is to perform a kind of scam called "regulator capture"[0].
It is what we have mostly observed to be the goal of complex financial regulations. For it to divert from this would be an exception.
[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp