AML is not itself an anti-drug-trafficking or anti-terrorism law. It’s a law designed to make money laundering more difficult by requiring banks to keep and submit more information on large transactions. Normal American citizens also launder and embezzle money, and AML laws have arguably been pretty effective against the baseline petty financial crime that defined American upper class finance during the previous century.
Besides, the assertion that drug traffickers are “richer than before” needs substantiation and clarification. They can be “richer” than before in terms of cash on hand (particularly outside of USD), but it doesn’t mean all that much if they can’t wash it back into legitimate looking finances. But I don’t even necessarily believe that first half.
Finally, AML is a set of US laws. If you want to claim that the US is an authoritarian government, go ahead; just don’t contort your argument through some abstract Bad Guy. They don’t have access to your bank records.
But, they're a Basel Committee initiative, where legislation is broadly mirrored around countries that have 95% of world GDP:
https://www.bis.org/list/bcbs/tid_199/index.htm
Central banks have come together to either help manage the order of world banking, or to allow evil Rothschild overlords to run the world, depending on which bit of the internet you're looking at.
AML isn't like the war on drugs because that's a silly pointless war, it's more like traffic laws. Are they still broken? All of the time.
Would you rather drive on roads without them?
It's that simple, AML makes the job harder to do which is known to be effective at making harder to do, or at least introduces fear of doing.
I’m sorry, but is the argument here that cryptocurrencies will somehow be instrumental in preventing the rise of fascism? Because that’s what the quote is from, although the chief motivator in the novel is independent journalism, not internet funny money.
What do you mean it never has? FDR literally stole everybody's gold in 1933 and got away with it.
I agree. The main goal of cryptocurrencies is crime. You may not like the laws, but that doesn't change that the main goal is crime.
And this is why it'll never be mainstream. Turns out extremely few people actually want the ultralibertarian dystopia where there is no taxes, no drug laws, no reversibility, no accountability, no economic sovereignity, etc… etc…
Coiners are like the people who say "abolish the police" and mean it literally. They want to burn down everything about society because surely out of the rubbles will rise a phoenix of perfection. Surely now that we've thrown out not just the baby with the bathwater, but also bulldozed the whole city the baby was in, the next baby will never even need a bath because it'll magically never get dirty.
