Assuming we're talking about low-cost chains that can actually be used for high-speed payment (which basically rules out L1 ETH/BTC)
* Sending money without paying an obscene amount of settlement fees and having to wait in some cases half a week. International transfers are an absolute UX nightmare for many banking providers.
* Being able to secure your account with proper OpsSec, i.e. identity/account management with proper hardware-based 2FA without any SMS loopholes. To date, I haven't found a bank that actually completely disables SMS 2FA as an option.
* Being able to pay without giving away your credentials. The credit card system is completely backwards. If you're online shopping regularly, your financial info and home address probably get leaked once a year.
I feel 10x more safe with self-custody than any banking solution I've used in the last decade. Traditional finance imo has been an absolute nightmare compared to crypto. Trad finance services bleed you out left and right, not to mention the hidden CC transaction fees people conveniently leave out of these discussions.
None of those things require crypto. They are essentially solved problems.
The UK banking system has had chip&pin for 20+ years, has had (Europe-wide?) instant payments for at least a decade.
Banking numbers in the UK are push not pull, you cannot take someone else's money just because you have their bank number. *
Payments require CVV (and have done for almost 30 years) and often additional 2fa verification through an app for larger payments. "Card not present" transactions are particular guarded against.
The regularatory framework is such that the banks must absorb the cost of fraud, unless they can demonstrate the customer has been particular negligent. The average banking customer in the UK does not live in fear of "identity theft", and does not own "identity insurance" or similar protection packages, the legal framework provides protection.
Solving the problem for international transfers simply requires greater international cooperation, not a different technical solution. It is a particular shame of Brexit that the UK has lost it's ability to lead in this area, because Europe generally has had a similar transformation over the past 20 years.
Expanding that banking cooperation to bring in more trusted countries would further reduce the cost of international remittance.
Someone trying to sell a technical solution to a social problem ought to always be treated with extra skepticism.
* Some pedant will point out direct debits, but that is only available to trusted providers, and is backed up by the Direct Debit Guarentee, so the risk won't fall to the customer if things do go wrong.
Many of the things I mentioned are absolutely not solved problems.
> Payments require CVV
Many companies regularly violate regulations and store CVVs against your will. How do you think millions of CC CVVs get leaked in many of these major hacks?
> Solving the problem for international transfers simply requires greater international cooperation
Sounds great in theory. How long has traditional finance had to work out these problems? We're in 2023 and I still can't send money to an US account without paying absurd fees.
Now compare that to what several crypto projects have achieved a handful of years after their inception.
> Someone trying to sell a technical solution to a social problem ought to always be treated with extra skepticism.
What makes secure payments more social than secure messaging or secure browsing? Imagine trying to solve TLS and E2E messaging with social solutions.
I had a similar opinion until I worked at a bank. Think of banks as an extension of the government, deputized to monitor all transactions for illegal activity. If banks fail they get in big trouble with the gov’t. Most bank transfers in the US are faster than any blockchain, but this is usually between known corporate entities that do a lot of business. For individuals there’s far more automated scrutiny. In addition, many smaller banks have ancient systems they refuse to upgrade, so overall speed of the banking system is held back by these weak links. Also, US banking oligopoly benefits from slower transactions and higher fees. Europe shows that regulators can force banks to operate faster and cheaper. That’s why this is not a tech issue, it’s a regulatory problem.
> I still can't send money to an US account without paying absurd fees.
You think that is a technological problem? Using crypto appears cheap (despite being inferior technology) because it simply skips 99% of what banks are doing.
Well, clearly I don't need 99% of whatever the bank is doing to send a transaction between two accounts I own. Add to that all the things that many banks continuously fail to provide, like proper OpsSec, transparent fees, full programmability via APIs.
> despite being inferior technology
Could you clarify? Are you talking about a particular protocol, or an implementation component, or mean crypto in general?
a) Theory: In any engineering or optimisation problem, adding a constraint makes the solution not better, and, if the constraint is binding, worse. So, we would not expect distributed state machine replication (which was solved in the late 90s, with BFT-style consensus such as Paxos and Raft etc.) to get better by requiring permissionlessness. (And the latter is, in my view, the actual defining characteristic of what's now known as blockchain; though of course you have a couple of permissioned blockchains that are basically rebranding of existing technology to ride the hype-train.)
b) Practice: You could trivially run a BTC (ie, Longest Chain Rule) or ETH (ie, BFT-type) style network with extremely high reliability with some, say, 10 nodes that are permissioned and (at least 51%) trusted. That would use around 10-100 W (and you could probably achieve far higher throughput). Instead, BTC uses 20 GW, ETH around 1 MW. So, the requirement of permissionlessness increases energy usage by a factor of several thousand to billions.
Furthermore, you lose many many other features of centralised systems (such as that you can correct mistakes cheaply, replace lost keys, undo fraud, etc.)
So, basically, you employ a vastly inferior technology, just so you can circumvent the law. Really don't see why anyone should support that.
Raft cannot deal with byzantine failures, so it's not a BFT protocol. Neither is the original Paxos, unless extended to Byzantine Paxos. Both are CFT by default.
> So, we would not expect distributed state machine replication to get better by requiring permissionlessness.
Right, but the banking system isn't a 600LoC Raft implementation. By your own admission, the bulk of inefficiencies come from the other 99% of stuff banks do.
So the question is: how much regulatory burden can be reduced if we were to switch to a crypto-based infrastructure.
> just so you can circumvent the law.
I can pay taxes in crypto to my local government. We also have crypto ATMs in several places here. Blockchain companies are working very closely with financial regulators. Not sure what kind of laws I'm supposedly circumventing here.
By BFT-style I meant employing rounds of voting rather than longest chain, thus being always consistent and eventually available (unlike LCR, which is always available and eventually consistent), but fair enough. Anyways, in the permissioned setting this was all solved in the 90s iirc.
Then, so, just moving stuff around in a robust and even distributed ledger is, we can all agree, while not trivial, a solved problem.
So then one can impose further constraints.
Either, 1), comply with the law and rules and regulation, and sure, that will make it less efficient. But that is the 99% of the work banks do that crypto doesn’t do, and they are not being done for fun, but for good reasons.
Or 2), permissionlessness, but what for? So you can avoid 1), because otherwise you wouldn’t need to incur the tremendous costs of 2).
I don’t think we should adapt the AirBnB/Uber approach (how much of the regulatory cost of fire regulations/working time restrictions/insurance cost can we avoid) to money transmission.
It is obviously trivially possible to do legitimate transactions with crypto, just as you can cut an onion with a machine gun. But that’s not the raison d’être of a machine gun. And the raison d’être of crypto is to escape regulation, as Satoshi basically said in the original emails, and as is abundantly clear not only from looking at the last 15 years of history, but also from the willingness to incur the massive overheads of permissionlessness.
Better isn't objective. Not supporting it is fine but outlawing it ultimately means sending men with guns to stop people from interacting with a block chain. If you put bullet holes in people for their cryptographic fetishes, which is what the state will do ( or maybe if lucky they just flashbang a baby), you might be the baddie.
Sure, just as the bad bad SEC sends men with guns after people trying to do an unregistered IPO. Terrible, the last 90 years of regulated IPOs. The oppression.
To give one more counter-point to your "fraud costs are baked in":
Self-custody as is common in crypto isn't really a thing in traditional finance (for most people anyways) - having your money backed 1:1 by cash is an extremely expensive service.
The bank accounts most people have are essentially low-risk lending agreements.
So any kind of cost calculation should factor in the financial gain of lending out your assets.
Well, yes. Otherwise, why would you or anyone, really, be against arbitrary money transfers into (or out of) Iran, or North Korea, or Russia? Yet here we are.
Proper OpsSec is a luxury. With crypto: You lose your password, your money is gone. Your password is stolen, your money is gone. A proper solution involves several hardware devices with additional security (iPhone, iPad, Mac, YubiKey with biometrics, a safe with an envelope, etc.). Most people on earth can't handle it.
Credit card fees are high in bank-friendly jurisdictions. Not in most jurisdictions. PayPal only came about because the banking system in the US is so utter crap - that doesn't mean that it's bad as bad elsewhere.
The crappiness of banks is contingent on bad regulation. The crappiness of crypto is inherent in the sub-par technology: adding a constraint (eg permissionlessness) is costly.
I live in a third world country and nobody uses crypto to send money. The existing remittance system works fine.
Crypto's claim in this area is that could be cheaper than remittances in the traditional banking system. But remittance fees using traditional banking are already only 1.5% so we're not talking about saving massive amounts of money in most circumstances.
Which is probably why virtually nobody has switched to it for remittances.
Indeed, the fees involved in sending in the vast majority of crypto, certainly Bitcoin and ethereum, are complete non-starters for this use case.
In my opinion, it's a shame, because this is something that crypto could do extremely well. But here we are. I do believe that it will be solved at some point, as long as regulation doesn't make that impossible. It is making it much more difficult for new coins to get started. Obviously that is needed to some extent because we saw all the shit coins over the last several years that ripped people off, but finding a happy medium is essential and challenging.
Yeah, the last time I looked I would pay the equivalent of 1% to buy USDT (i.e. they are selling for 1% higher than the current spot price) and then another 1-1.3% to sell it and get fiat back out. So 2-2.5% roundtrip versus 1.5% for a regular remittance.
So crypto is actually more expensive that the traditional banking system on top of just being weirder. Like, you have to use Binance's P2P in my country which is just way more complicated than the traditional remittance system of "give us their bank account details".
1) That's a valid moral use IMHO but not necessarily a legal use case
2) Have you actually done it? There are many services that do this for cheap and fast. Your relatives don't have to open a crypto trading account and use banking to convert the money back into a currency they can use to purchase stuff, they can simply take cash from a chain store, the post office or a local bank branch.
3) When the local currency goes through hyperinflation people store their money in USD, EUR or GOLD. Putting money into crypto is an extra step that don't have to be there doesn't add any value because needs to go through a digital channel like a bank and when shits the fan banks can be PIA. Your local Change office in the mall or the guy at the street who sells and buys USD/EUR/GOLD tend to be more reliable.
Getting your money into a crypto coin that tracks a stable currency can in some cases be cheaper and easier than getting your money into that currency.
Yeah, like Liberty Reserve back in 2006. A centralised stable coin, which was shut down by the US government a few years later for the usual reasons: money laundering, crime, etc.
Crypto, being permissionless, is just a bit harder to shut down; but not any more legal.
I send money to 'the third world' a lot and it's extremely easy without having to resort to crypto nonsense. Hearing these implausible points repeated every time this question comes up just seems desperate now.
T+0 settlement is something blockchain has solved that tradfi has not.
Asset tokenization is another big one- getting solved, at least.
And inflation hedging.
Regulatory def has not caught up but in 10-20 years you individually will definitely have some portion of your financial transactions, whether payments or investments, settling on blockchain.
T+0 settlement is something blockchain has solved that tradfi has not
The reason 'tradfi' doesn't offer T+0 has nothing to do with technology (or lack of). It's an intentional policy choice and not due to technical limitations.
Policy choice is a good example. If you disagree with the policy choice of traditional finance, you can opt for a system that is more in alignment with you.
Sure. And if you disagree with money laundering choices and tax dodging choices and terrorist financing choices of traditional finance, you can opt for a system that is more in alignment with you.
LOL. Here's a novel idea: take debt, and chop it into fungible pieces that can be traded (a process we could call "securitisation"). Let's call it a bond. Or: Take equity, and chop it into fungible pieces that can be traded. Let's call it a share. That's impossible to do without crypto. Right? Right???
Any type of transaction that "traditional finance" or the governments behind them don't approve of. Controlled substances, firearms, sex work, gambling, funding politically unpopular movements, etc.
The mindset that can't understand the valid use cases of cryptocurrencies is approximately the same mindset that believes the status quo is acceptable, and that smashing the boot of the State into the necks of private citizens' ability to transact is a moral good.
If world governments and traditional finance were far less oppressive and moralistic about the freedom to transact, then you'd have a solid point. (Although depending on the jurisdiction in question, I'd say money laundering may be a valid use case, as well).
> > Can anyone name an application besides those two things that traditional finance doesn't handle better?
People who want to subtract themselves to what Central Bankers (who are de-facto unelected Sovreigns) are doing have no other option if not for crypto and gold.
In general what you say about scams and money laundering could also be concomitant...how do you think Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan arrived to be the companies they are today? They were pulling so many scams and laundring especially during the 1880-2011 period. And quite frankly also after the touted post GFC regulations they keep laundering and breaking laws (Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan etc, they all had a major multi billion dollar scandal or more in the aftermath of the GFC)
People aren't stupid, they can see how nowadays Central Banks, Governments, big Commercial Banks, big tech are all about stability AKA the winners realize that they won and want to prevent other spins at the roulette, actually ideally they want to close all the tables in the Casino so they'd be the perpetual winners from now on.
If you zoom out and see the picture from 30.000ft you might guess how some scams and laundering option for the common person isn't the worst thing that can happen when the powers that be want to freeze everything in place and sit on their winnings (while also continuing to break the law , scamming and laundering money)
The other guy that said this has been downvoted because Hacker News for whatever reason seems to be out of the loop on how this works, but buying illegal drugs on the Internet is a perfectly valid answer. It's more or less the most accepted way short of a corrupt physician writing bullshit prescriptions of getting steroids and any other performance enhancing drug for athletes. And it's far safer and more effective to do this on the Internet than from some "locally known" source that transacts in cash. Sources on the Internet are illegal but otherwise entirely legitimate businesses. There are large web communities of people who buy and review their products. There are trusted third-party labs that do chemical analysis to prove the purity of a product, and reputable sources advertise that they will and, in fact, actually do reimburse purchasers who randomly send samples to these labs and post the results publicly on known review forums.
The fact that the non-athlete universe seems entirely unaware of this quite well-functioning parallel economy does not mean it doesn't exist.
HN is largely pro-status-quo. Deferring to parasitic gatekeepers is how things get done in the worldview of the HN mindset, so this reaction shouldn't surprise you.
When evaluating a given action from the HN zeitgeist, a decent rubric is: if a Western government authorizes it, it is universally good. If a Western government discourages it, it is Hitler.
Further, and importantly: if the action in question is determined to be Hitler, it is not merely bad; it is unthinkable (because the mere act of considering it would make you, the thinker, also Hitler), and therefore not worthy of being considered an option in the first place.
Well each to their own. I'm enthusiastic as I just bought some dumb meme thing that 5xed. Coinmarketcap has daily trading volume at $92bn so there's quite a lot of punting going on.
> The plot, prosecutors said, was simple: members of the Make Money Online (MMO) team would purchase crime proceeds via cryptocurrency at a discount and transfer those proceeds into bank accounts held by entities affiliated with newspaper.
> The illegal proceeds would ultimately be moved back into the Epoch Times accounts through "tens of thousands of layered transactions", including through prepaid debit cards and financial accounts opened using stolen identification information.
What are “crime proceeds”?
Are these seized assets by the Feds sold at a discount? Or stolen assets by criminals (also sold at a discount)?
Either way, sounds like classic money laundering as the follow up.
Typically any proceed from a crime. In the simplest case, if someone stole money from someone, the money stolen is proceeds from the crime. Similar is if someone stole property and sold it, the money is the proceed. Same with selling illegal drugs, or money received from extortion or bribery. Like you said, regardless of the crime the money needs to be laundered.
The indictment says very little about the underlying crime schemes. (I understand indictments usually don't say and don't need to say very much).
- "The prepaid debit cards were issued by different debit card companies and loaded with U.S. dollars that had been unlawfully obtained through various frauds (i.e. , the crime proceeds). For example, certain of the prepaid debit cards were loaded with fraudulently procured unemployment insurance benefits obtained using stolen personal identification information of U.S. residents." (page 4)
> They used stolen identity information to make false unemployment insurance claims in other people’s names.
I don't think "they," meaning Epoch Times, did the actual identity theft / unemployment insurance fraud. The indictment says they "purchased" the debit cards, and there are no charges related to those crimes.
It sounds like Epoch Times found a platform where such fraudsters were offloading their phony unemployment debit cards at a discount (this started in 2020, when I presume there was a huge boom in unemployment fraud) and tried to flip them around as legitimate donations and subscription revenue for an easy profit.
> It sounds like Epoch Times found a platform where such fraudsters were offloading their phony unemployment debit cards at a discount [...] and tried to flip them around as legitimate donations and subscription revenue for an easy profit.
Just to be clear, since the framing here doesn't make it clear if you understand: that is textbook money laundering. "I didn't know where the money on these cards came from I was just buying them as a product" is not remotely a defense. AML/KYC laws apply to all financial transactions, not just to banks, and yes, "buying millions of dollars of pre-paid debit cards for real money" is quite clealy a "financial" transaction.
These indictments always read so weird, like they're trying to describe a nefarious criminal organization even though its behavior is just the same as any other enterprise.
So they performed an unspecified financial transaction (allegedly illegal but not proven), which turned a profit, then paid the money out to a lot of people, who in turn paid some of it back to them later. Isn't that just... the economy? Walmart pays Alice for doing customer service, then Alice pays Walmart for breakfast cereal and soap.
Even the ostensible crimes are like, they opened a bank account, deposited their own money in it and then withdrew it again without stealing anything or harming anyone, but you're not allowed to do that under someone else's name. Meanwhile lots of people have reasons to want to have an anonymous payments system and a lot of them are quite sympathetic, to the point that the only reason it's even illegal is to help lazy prosecutors who can't be bothered to prove the original crime. And then lots of sympathetic people break the law, because it's a bad law and they have little alternative.
Then the whole thing is alleged to be a grand conspiracy. But wait, what percentage of the accounts were under someone else's name? Was it done for this purpose, or do they just do business with a lot of people and some of them are e.g. undocumented immigrants who couldn't use their own name?
If there is some kind of theft happening here then why can't they prosecute the stealing instead of these moving money around allegations?
The last line of the story is also just uncanny. One of these things is not like the others:
> In the years since, it has grown into purportedly one of the US's most powerful conservative news organisations and a home to conspiracy theories, right-wing misinformation and sharp opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
> they opened a bank account, deposited their own money in it and then withdrew it again without stealing anything or harming anyone, but you're not allowed to do that under someone else's name
Yes, you're not allowed to do that under someone else's name, that's what the crime is.
> can't be bothered to prove the original crime
The entire point of money laundering is to make it as difficult as possible to find the original crime or connect it. In an environment of anonymous payments, how do you prove X made a payment to Y?
It's basically an extension of anti-fencing law, which is a pretty old principle. You're not allowed to help people fence stolen goods, and it's not a defence to look the other way. Money has to be treated specially because it's fungible and not a "good", but the principle is the same. If you were running a "cars bought for cash" scheme and refusing to check if any of the cars were stolen, I would assume you'd eventually be prosecuted for that.
> Yes, you're not allowed to do that under someone else's name, that's what the crime is.
But that's the objection. That's a stupid crime. The only reason anybody wants to do that is that they can't open one under nobody's name, even though there are legitimate and innocent reasons to want to do that.
> The entire point of money laundering is to make it as difficult as possible to find the original crime or connect it.
Money does that already by itself, because it's fungible. It's why AML laws don't work -- their effectiveness is basically zero. The harm they cause to innocent people far exceeds the benefits in rooting out undiscovered crimes -- not least because crimes that are causing harm to people are generally quite easily discovered, when the victims go to the police and report them.
> In an environment of anonymous payments, how do you prove X made a payment to Y?
You ignore the concept of wanting to do this at all and just prove that X committed the underlying crime. Because if there is no underlying crime then there is no need to prove whether or not there was a payment. The government has no legitimate interesting in proving what kind of literature or contraceptives you like to buy.
> You're not allowed to help people fence stolen goods, and it's not a defence to look the other way.
The way this is typically implemented is that the stolen goods are returned to the owner if you're caught with them. You don't actually get prosecuted unless they can prove you were in on it. After all, how is anybody supposed to know that? You go to jail because you bought something at a yard sale not knowing it was stolen?
But that's exactly why it doesn't apply to money. Money is entirely fungible. If a criminal steals your car and sells it to a chop shop for $5000, and then the chop shop spends the money at Walmart and McDonalds, and then the money ends up in their bank account from which it goes to their suppliers and shareholders and other customers, just exactly who are you supposed to be entitled to recover from? And what is your retirement fund manager supposed to do, investigate each of Walmart's customers to see where they got their money?
It would also be double counting. The stolen property is the car, not the money the thief sells it for. Unless the buyer didn't know the car was stolen, which is a separate crime with a different victim. And even then you're not trying to recover those specific bills or care about where they went after, you're just trying to recover any equivalent amount of assets from the criminal you can prove fraudulently sold a stolen car.
Investigating crimes is for the police, not corporations. When you force corporations to do it, they do it capriciously and oppressively, because there are no constitutional safeguards.
I think discussing this under an example of an AML prosecution is silly. AML does work, it just has a lot of collateral privacy loss. Whether that level of privacy is worth the economic destruction of an all-fraud economy is another thing.
> This week I had an opportunity to properly deep dive into this work by Ronald F Pol. It finds that AML policy has less than a 0.1% impact on criminal finances. Compliance costs exceed recovered illicit funds recovered more than 100x. Banks, taxpayers, and citizens are penalised more than criminals. Policymakers keep blaming banks and hitting them with massive fines hoping to fix the problem, but it doesn't.
AML prosecutions happen, but that's mostly because it's easy to find otherwise-innocent people who run afoul of the rules, or as something to tack on when you're already prosecuting someone for something else. Not because they're doing any good against criminals who otherwise wouldn't be caught.
Just think about it. If someone is being prosecuted for money laundering in addition to an underlying crime, they would still have been prosecuted for the underlying crime without it. If they're only being prosecuted for money laundering, we don't even know that there was an underlying crime, in which case why are we prosecuting someone engaging in no apparent harmful activity?
> the economic destruction of an all-fraud economy
Where does this assumption come from? Historically most monetary transactions occurred in anonymous cash. Was the result "economic destruction" or "an all-fraud economy"?
The proposal isn't to legalize fraud, it's to legalize the digital equivalent of cash.
>> Yes, you're not allowed to do that under someone else's name, that's what the crime is.
>But that's the objection. That's a stupid crime. The only reason anybody wants to do that is that they can't open one under nobody's name, even though there are legitimate and innocent reasons to want to do that.
It is far from true that the only reason people falsify identity in transactions is because KYC laws require identity. You should learn more about what criminals actually do.
Explain why someone would want to open a new empty bank account in someone else's name other than because they couldn't or don't want to open a new empty bank account in their own name.
That's the crime we're talking about here. Not committing fraud so you can steal someone else's money, but only lying about your name because you don't want to give your name and the law prohibits you from not giving a name.
The problem isn't even that it's illegal to open a bank account in someone else's name. The problem is that you're prohibited from anonymously opening a bank account.
> Explain why someone would want to open a new empty bank account in someone else's name other than because they couldn't or don't want to open a new empty bank account in their own name.
Putting income into someone else’s tax bracket is the obvious use case. You lack imagination or experience with the real world.
That has nothing to do with this. To do that you would be long-term leaving the money in their account, requiring their cooperation because they would have the legal right to withdraw it. The same scheme works when you have the person whose name is on the account open it themselves.
On top of that, that isn't even how withholding works. The tax isn't taken out by the bank, it's taken out by the employer, so to make your scheme work you'd have to be lying to the employer about who the employee is rather than the bank about whose account it is. And doing this kind of thing by any mechanism also doesn't need to be bank fraud because it's already tax fraud.
Moreover, in practice how those schemes work doesn't require you to put some other person's name on the account, because they would put a corporate entity's name on the account, where the corporation is a legal entity type or is incorporated in a jurisdiction that has different tax treatment. It seems like you're just making up fake problems with giving people the ability to buy things digitally without having their privacy invaded.
You need an example of something it would enable somebody to do that isn't already independently illegal. Otherwise you don't need this to be illegal because you can still prosecute them for that.
I am divesting of a business that has many kinds of transactions. Counterparties often suggest a cash discount so that one or both parties can hide the income.
That’s an interesting opinion but there is a law and order benefit to a transparent financial system. Prosecuting launderers increases confidence in our economy.
Confidence in the financial system comes from knowing you won't suddenly lose access to your funds, and AML promotes the opposite of this. There are countless stories of small businesspeople suddenly being locked out of their bank accounts because their transaction patterns looked suspicious. On the global level, more and more countries are reducing the dependence on the US dollar to avoid sanctions or appropriation; without AML laws the US dollar would be in a much stronger position internationally as countries wouldn't have to worry about their funds being blocked or frozen.
> There are countless stories of small businesspeople suddenly being locked out of their bank accounts because their transaction patterns looked suspicious
This doesn’t sound like one of those stories. Remains to be seen once the prosecution and defense make their cases in court and a judge or jury rules on it.
Even if this turns out to be one of the stories where the defendants are actually wrongdoers, those laws are still resulting in "countless stories of small businesspeople suddenly being locked out of their bank accounts because their transaction patterns looked suspicious." Which isn't worth it, because the wrongdoers can still be prosecuted for their underlying crimes without having that.
> source?
You're asking for a source for a logical argument. It's fairly straightforward: If other countries (e.g. BRIC) have to worry that the US can shut off their money, they're going to build and support alternatives to US dollars to mitigate the threat, which weakens the dollar.
Huh? I'm not big on police over-reach but to claim that the chain of responsibility for a crime ends at some arbitrary point is silly on its face. Should either side of a hitman-for-hire arrangement not be penalized for participating in a crime? Should we eliminate laws criminalizing murder because some people are wrongfully tried and convicted? Turning off a criminal's money laundering spigot is a deterrent against committing that crime.
I don't see how that's confined to a logical argument. Surely there must be data to back up this claim if it's so easily provable. How much stronger would the dollar be today? Source? Even a source for "countless small businesspeople being locked out of their bank accounts" would be interesting.
> I'm not big on police over-reach but to claim that the chain of responsibility for a crime ends at some arbitrary point is silly on its face.
It's not about an arbitrary point, it's about whether you're actively participating in the crime. So for example:
> Should either side of a hitman-for-hire arrangement not be penalized for participating in a crime?
Paying someone to commit murder is conspiracy to commit murder, not money laundering. It has nothing inherently to do with banks or KYC and is just as illegal if you pay the hitman in gold bullion or Monero.
> Turning off a criminal's money laundering spigot is a deterrent against committing that crime.
But that doesn't actually happen, because the rules only trap the unwary. Innocent people who don't know that doing something will get their account locked even though they've done nothing wrong.
Criminal organizations are repeat players with their own lawyers, so they know what not to do, and then they don't get caught because money is fungible. For example, if they're selling pot brownies and it's illegal to sell pot, they just put down on the form that they're selling ordinary brownies. Or cherry pie, or car washes, or it doesn't matter what because they just put a legal product on the form and then they only get caught if the government independently comes to investigate their criminal enterprise, which is the same way they get caught without any kind of bank reporting or KYC.
> Surely there must be data to back up this claim if it's so easily provable. How much stronger would the dollar be today? Source?
How would you even propose to measure this? If there was a source it would just be a paper someone published making the same case as the message board comment. To actually measure the effect you would need to get rid of the KYC laws and then measure the result, which hasn't happened, so the only thing you're going to get either way is reasoning for what would be expected to happen under the circumstances.
But how would you expect other countries to respond to the US leveraging the dollar in this way to infringe on their sovereignty and seize the assets of their citizens?
> Even a source for "countless small businesspeople being locked out of their bank accounts" would be interesting.
The entire point of an indictment is to lay out a series of probable crimes in order to arrest the individual or individuals, stop the crimes in progress, and set up a potential prosecution. It is not a prosecution.
Further, as to prosecuting the thefts, for all we know that is the next step, or they have already done that and secured the cooperation of those conspirators as witnesses.
An indictment implies that charges are being filed and therefore that the prosecution already thinks they can prove their case. If they can't even prove if there is an underlying crime, what are they supposed to be preventing?
The entire problem is that they've set things up so they can charge people with something even if they can't prove the underlying crime, in order to exert undue leverage on them -- or even go all the way to conviction without ever proving the underlying crime, which is an injustice.
Wow. I wonder what they were buying? It’s not spelled out in the article
I didn’t realize they were affiliated with Falun Gong. The only reason I even know this company existed is their billboards started popping up on the highway recently.
> I didn’t realize they were affiliated with Falun Gong. The only reason I even know this company existed is their billboards started popping up on the highway recently.
Their media arm is quite ubiquitous in Asia. They also run Shen Yun [0], whose pamphlets you may have seen around from time to time.
> For example, certain of the prepaid debit cards were loaded with fraudulently procured unemployment insurance benefits obtained using stolen personal identification information of U.S. residents.
> The crime proceeds were sold on Cryptocurrency Platform-1 to affiliates of the Media Company's Foreign Office at
discounted rates of approximately 70 to 80 cents per dollar and in exchange for cryptocurrency.
We used to occasionally get Epoch Times issues stuffed into our mailbox. (Illegally, I understand, since they were not delivered by the USPS.)
They were full of the most disgusting bigoted hateful rhetoric. It actually made me feel quite uncomfortable, thinking about who was writing and distributing it.
"Shen Yun", a show that also has billboard ads all over the bay area, is also a Falun Gong operation, just like Epoch.
Bias alert first, I'm your genuine Chinese, and I don't really like Falun Gong.
Maybe they are full of rhetoric, but their propaganda is effective, to the point which you can predict people's narrative based on the recent publications from The Epoch Times, though it mainly effects under-educated Chinese-speaking families who can't consume more established English newspaper/media.
Being a far-right (See the description on Wikipedia [1]) media, they mirrors the narrative of other English far-right medias, and they forwards those narratives to Chinese-reading consumers. I guess that's their business model.
Also, "Shen Yun" is not Chinese culture, rather the Chinese culture in "Shen Yun" was used as props to add a dose of eastern mystery to attract western audience. Very nice marketing I might add.
> They were full of the most disgusting bigoted hateful rhetoric. It actually made me feel quite uncomfortable, thinking about who was writing and distributing it.
It's really weird that the people behind Epoch, are the same that one can find peacefully protesting in many major cities against the treatment they receive in China.
I have to say, their behaviour in recent years made me rethink their claims about illegal organ harvesting. I know both things, they being a hateful cult and being oppressed and killed by the Chinese regime, can be true, but their alignment with far right groups and conspiracy theorists is hard to overlook.
During early COVID, they also reported that, based on calls to overloaded crematoriums under false name, the number of COVID deaths was much higher than given in the official figures. Those official figures were eventually corrected upwards, confirming the Epoch times reports.
Falun Gong and Epoch Times receive funding from Congress via the National Endowment for Democracy. I guess the USA promotes them since they're a thorn in the side of China.
Organ harvesting in Chinese prisons is a real thing that happened (state even acknowledged it), but to what extent and until when is unclear. The probably most comprehensive write-up on the issue is by the China Tribunal, but I wouldn't take their words ar face value, since all the authors are falun gong associated or have a vested interest in making China look bad. If you're interested in the topic, read the report, it contains a lot of circumstantial evidence and conjectures. Nothing that would hold up in a court of law, but imo. At least raises a number of questions surrounding Chinese claims on the issue.
The Falun Gong claim that their organs were targeted because they are "purer" sounds like straight up bullshit to me. Horrible as they may be, the CCP is very materialistic and doesn't put much stake in spiritual bullshit.
Falun Gong itself was both a cult and a spiritual movement, with at its peak close to 100 million practitioners in China. Since the harsh crackdown in the 90s, mostly the cult side is left, and they are dangerous loonies.
> Since the harsh crackdown in the 90s, mostly the cult side is left, and they are dangerous loonies.
Be careful what you believe about the Falun Gong; the CCP has spent vast amounts of money and resources smearing them, you can't take everything you read at face value.
True, but I think what they say about themselves is already enough of an indictment. And then the leader lives on a giant luxurious ranch in DC with his dozen or so wives, while managing a global disinformation empire that allegedly is also involved in criminal behaviour.
Care to give links for that? Last I heard about it they had a property in NY and their leader had only one wife. I googled to see if I could find anything about their DC ranch but didn't found anything.
I'm sorry, I actually mixed up my cults, you are completely correct that they are located close to NY, and it does not seem that their leader has any allegations of sexual misconduct.
> They were full of the most disgusting bigoted hateful rhetoric.
Such as?
Excuse for doubting, but people - especially people on this board - tend to use those kind of words and accusations whenever there's somebody that has a different opinion on some issue.
I've only seen stuff published by Epoch Times occasionally and those times they've had a much tamer profile than what you're describing.
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It would be great if the article gives more information about the scheme. EDIT: great that breden has added the actual case.
Crypto just sounds a a little clickbait because fraud is fraud no matters the means except if crypto has something different in this case.
I think it is more interesting that the Epoch Times was a beneficiary from this scheme so I don't see as a normal case where the CFO enrich himself. In almost all frauds, specially in crypto, the enriched party is an individual, group, or another company that use their position against a company or community for himself. For example, FTX and Three Arrows Capital [1].
BTW, I am the plaintiff in an ongoing crypto lawsuit [2].
Their logic is that the US government behaves like a communist regime, doing whatever it can to punish and silence real dissent (like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange), so they assumed it might just be using this as an excuse to punish a newspaper that often hosts anti-US-government content.
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