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A comment on How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work?. Parent comment

Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by olalonde on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:15PM (#44975398)
What I described is actually extremely mundane. Maybe you started with Bitcoin Core and later switched to a lighter SPV wallet like Electrum when the blockchain got too big. Maybe you bought a hardware wallet and moved your BTC offline. Maybe you sent some to Binance to invest in Ethereum at some point. There are countless reasons to shuffle BTC around - and countless reasons why you couldn't prove your full transaction history dating back to 2012 - none of which involve any crimes.
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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by vkou on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:27PM (#44975559)
Has anyone ever been convicted for doing a few on-exchange trades and conversions? You should be keeping your receipts for tax purposes, it's on you to provide them up to a statue of limitations.

Or is this just a theoretical concern for anyone who isn't laundering Bitcoin stolen through ransomware or from exchanges?

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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by olalonde on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:44PM (#44975780)
You missed the point. The point was that there are many ordinary and mundane reasons why you wouldn't be able to prove the full chain of custody for the BTC you acquired in 2012. It would be a real practical concern if you are a law-abiding person. If you're a criminal, it's not much of a concern since laundering money is relatively easy.
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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by XorNot on Thursday August 21, 2025 @06:43PM (#44979026)
Yes but the claim is those are hard to track details, and then what's described is a timeline of consistent interaction with the money which you're now planning to claim you have no knowledge of.

And some of those interactions are taxable events - e.g. if you are exchanging out of cryptocurrency denominations, then by US tax law as a US citizen that was a taxable event.

[1] https://www.blockpit.io/tax-guides/crypto-tax-usa

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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by fragmede on Friday August 22, 2025 @06:33AM (#44982848)
Chris Borden went to prison for Bitcoin related financial malfeasance.

https://youtu.be/cuIRvn89988

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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by vkou on Friday August 22, 2025 @01:20PM (#44987154)
Was he actively involved in money laundering, theft, fraud, or tax evasion?

Did the jury have reasonable grounds for voting to convict?

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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by fragmede on Friday August 22, 2025 @01:27PM (#44987226)
He sold Bitcoin without doing KYC and went to prison for operating an exchange. He sold Bitcoin to someone he knew was somehow involved with cocaine. I don't know how morally wrong what he did was, but legally it sent him to prison.
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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by vkou on Saturday August 23, 2025 @11:31AM (#44996694)
This seems to be... WAI. And not just a guy getting punished for doing a few perfectly legal trades. It's hard to do all of the above by accident.
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Re:How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work? by abullinan on Thursday August 21, 2025 @08:04PM (#44979677)
What you described ($100 -> $1MM) is completely a straw man that undermines itself by using a system that is effectively a gambling machine to justify all kinds of persecution. Sorry, if you’re gonna play with a system designed for crime, you better be ready for a world of pain.
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