Why? They are a net benefit to society and above board businesses.

If you subscribe to the belief that criminal activity is a drain on society then there is a case for trying to combat it. Then it becomes a question of "do these KYC laws cost more to society than the crimes they prevent?" That is a harder question, but it is hard to overstate the amount of damage to a society rampant corruption and crime can cause and the benefits of allowing anonymous finance are somewhat more nebulous.

Good luck, not going to happen.

Democratic systems won't change these laws because there is no popular support for change - there is a reasonably large 'law-and-order' and 'corruption-as-main-concern' voter demographic who strongly support these laws, and the niche of HN techies and libertarians who'd oppose them is insignificantly small in comparison; and authoritarian systems won't change these laws because their leadership supports them even more.

I acknowledge that that is the prevailing sentiment, and the obviously correct conclusion. And yet I can't accept that kind of defeatist thinking. To embrace defeatism on that level is to basically accept that nothing will ever change, and we know that things do, occasionally, change. It's not always clear exactly what it takes to create wide-scale societal change, and yes one could easily spend their whole life engaging in activism and die with nothing to show for it. Yet people do still persist, for their own reasons. And sometimes the good guys do win.

It's not passive giving up - many people, including me, consider the social change you want to drive as harmful in aggregate, and would fight against it; and I'm asserting that at the moment we are in the majority.

I understand the idealistic benefits of freedom of payments, however, the KYC/AML restrictions are there for valid reasons that simply have much more magnitude of importance (for example, the scale of corruption and its social harm is so big that even a slight decrease in that due to KYC/AML enforcement far outweighs all the current social costs of KYC/AML) and removing them would mean that in aggregate the bad guys have won. I'm not saying that you're a bad guy, but you are an "ally of convenience" to them as achieving your position would let the bad guys win and I would consider it immoral to allow that.

We definitely should strive for better, more accurate AML/KYC implementations that have less impact on legitimate trade. But arguing for removing AML/KYC just because of that is effectively throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The most compelling reason to argue against these kinds of laws is to think of their full consequences if suddenly illegal transactions were virtuous, as they have been in the past when totalitarian regimes have gained power. The present day doesn’t put a high value on freedom to transact in the west, because most illegal transactions in the west are for things many would consider criminal or immoral. But if times change (as they do in history) then not securing the freedom to transact and a vibrant economy rooted in this freedom will be come to seen as a grave error imo.

Fair enough.

Why?