Dump the cash out of the airplane on the way and claim it never happened.

I’m not sure how much of it is current in light of the sanctions. The big example it uses (90% of the book) is Khazakhstan.

From what I’ve read more recently, many rich/middle class folks in Latin America are moving to the US. If their businesses so much as look at drug money, and then they so much as look at an American bank, they can wind up in a US prison for a long time.

So they just move to America to get away from drug gangs.

The US does not f*ck around with criminal financing.

I thought our last 15 years of politicians were massively unaccountable and corrupted by self-created taxpayer slush funds plus lobbyist megabucks, corporate kickbacks and post-politics directorships.

I suppose politicians everywhere are essentially driven by the same human frailties, yet mostly worse than what I am seeing locally!

You ended up proving my point. Normal people don't research or develop cryptocurrency technology, they buy and sell it on Binance. It's hard enough for people to understand BTC, the altcoin situation is next to hopeless.

> As for Monero -- don't complain, let's bring it mainstream by building something.

I've gotten paid anonymously in XMR for a small programming task. It was a wonderful experience, I wish everybody would pay me that way. The technology already already works. If anything still needs to be built, it's even stronger privacy guarantees against the perpetual government encroachment.

This is a social problem. How do we get people to drop USD and start using XMR instead? It's a form of the ages old circular logic problem of bootstrapping: nobody uses it to buy things because nobody accepts it, and nobody accepts it because nobody uses it to buy things.

    Well, only specific bank accounts are subject to FACTA:
    
    ...
    
    Investment accounts and custodial accounts (of individuals and entities), even when they are a resident in the FACTA partner country. This is true, as long as the custody account doesn't have income flows into this accounts (eg dividends or interests).

There was almost certainly something crooked though: The account had a monthly fee, but almost anyone can get an account with no fees if they know about them.

also agree on the xenophobia -- but instead of culture this is turf wars over control of large dollar trade over time

It's really not. You don't make money by unnecessarily turning business away.

I'm also banned at Zelle, but Venmo and CashApp and Paypal are all fine.

What a weird world.

Of course none of them will tell me why I'm banned. I have my suspicions.

All this mandatory financial reporting for "anti-money laundering" purposes or whatever is just the financial arm of the global panopticon. You're defending total global surveillance and control. You're advocating giving up freedom for security.

I got a "no-doc" non-conforming FHA loan back then. They fucking strip searched me. It was not easy--I still have PTSD from it. That same loan is still available on the market.

You also need a citation on your reason for the financial crisis of 2008.

I had to walk away from my home BECAUSE of the financial crisis (after having paid down 90% of the principle). Was it triggered by defaults or the credit default swaps themselves? Sure, maybe some bad loans were floated,but the sophisticated, hot off of the regulation preventing it, people in New York started gambling on the plebs losing their homes. Well, a few plebs (really, over-leveraged affluent people) lost their homes, and a cascading effect of credit default swaps came due and spun out of control. The crisis was directly caused by Bill Clinton signing a bill that removed key regulation that would prevent the very thing that happened: Gambling on Wall Street.

So STFU.

There was a minor scandal a while back when it became clear Queen Elizabeth was using exotic techniques to hid her assets.

She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She just didn’t want people conflating her private assets with her royal persona.

Even Jeremy Corbyn (socialist, republican, then-head-of-Labour) didn’t criticize her for it.

She just didn’t want the public snooping in her private business.

I look forward to somebody demonstrating that. The author of the article, a domain expert, thinks otherwise.

> And FTX was just a massive, traditional fraud. Literally nothing to do with Cryptocurrency, other than as the medium of the fraud.

Other than the medium, the culture, the community, the domain, and the regulatory vacuum of cryptocurrency. So a great deal to do with it. And it's not as if it's an outlier for the space.

If it's really the burden you are concerned about, you might look again at cryptocurrency. The burden just to use it is relatively high. Then there are the higher caveat emptor burdens. And then we get to the vast, vast sums lost through volatility, exchange costs, user error, incompetence, fraud, and theft. Being upset about KYC/AML and not about that is a situation of motes and beams.

To a first and probably second approximation, crypto is only good for getting scammed and scamming others. There's a lot of overly credulous people in the field, which just attracts crime like a moth to a flame.

But in practice it is set up and carried out by people who often have some level of personal xenophobia. Thereby generating an institutional cover for personal feelings. The extent of this is impossible to verify. But certainly more than zero. And, anecdotally, likely far more than zero.

That the policies are not simply distributed in accordance with weak national financial controls is demonstrated by the fact that Patrick McKenzie (US citizen) has encountered these problems multiple times while trying to get Japanese banks to deal with US financial institutions. Japan does not doubt that the USA has strong national financial controls. But "foreigner wanting to deal with foreigners" still generates heightened scrutiny and sometimes real problems.

And the status quo where the banks take a bigger cut to pay for their big compliance departments and the government takes a bigger cut to pay for auditing those compliance departments is somehow better?

X-percent not in your pocket is X-percent not in your pocket no matter how you cut it. At least in the proposed "stop giving a crap" case nobody will be denied access to boring routine financial products because they have a 3rd cousin with the same name as a Turkish mob boss.

Man, for that brief shining window we really had perfection.

"This hasn't affected me, so it mustn't affect anyone!"

The grinding day-to-day slogging, through the mud of irrelevant and useless regulatory burden experienced by the "lesser" classes of civilization (and anyone actually trying to run a small business) is just astonishing.

Basically, many people just "stop". They can't navigate it, and know they'll never defeat it. So they just cease to try.

If it's that clearly untrue, presumably you can document this?

And I'll note that even if you can, it doesn't necessarily contradict what you're replying to, which was, "This will affect the typical user of the financial system precisely zero times during their lives."

With 330 million residents, millions of people could have KYC/AML problems and patio11 still could be right. I've never had a problem like that, and have only heard one person ever mention it. And he was an Australian trying to open a US bank account to get around certain Australian import taxes, so I suspect he was somebody who should have been having problems.

This applies here because both KYC and AML procedures are set up and carried out by private banks. Which makes it a private search, that fits squarely in the exemption.

In turn this begs the question of whether the government can encourage through intentionally vague regulation behavior that they cannot directly ask for. But given the courts we have, I suspect they will avoid answering this question.

Furthermore it is hardly the worst violation of the 4th that is common. I'm personally most incensed about civil forfeiture. Through the workaround of suing your stuff instead of you, all Constitutional protections are voided. The result is essentially legalized robbery by the government, carried out by the very law enforcement departments that directly profit from the proceeds. Given that the courts have repeatedly OKed this, why would you expect them to object to KYC and AML?

In practice though that’s exactly what happens. Banks have to look for transactions that are potentially illegal (including OFAC and AML). And the banks not only report but have to block some of those transactions or they become liable for the initial crime (if it existed at all).

Very little separates the state from an organised criminal enterprise. A particularly cynical person might point out just how comfortably well the operating logic of states and large multinational corporations fits into the world of organised crime. The only thing that separates the two is legality.

You want to enslave a bunch of people and profit off their labor in some far flung corner of the world to whom nobody is much paying attention? No problem, just don't do it yourself. Invest in cobalt mining or diamonds in Africa, or manufacturing in China. A territory is getting uppity? Support the governmental structure that wants to brutally repress them by buying from their corporations or investing in their treasuries. Want to promote some nightmarish theocratic brutality? Saudi Aramco stock is a steal these days. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with something that organised crime has historically profited from, which you could not do in a white market context in the modern world by simply trading in the full breadth of financial instruments, particularly in concert with the state financial actors already promoting these very things.

The thing that really scares me though is that as I get older and more cynical and see the way people are responding as the boot stamps down harder on them, I find it harder and harder to care or see the above as something to get righteously indignant about. Why should I find the slavery of people abhorrent when they so clearly crave the lash?

Things like alcohol and marijuana have become legal, but I don't see much evidence that Budwiser/InBev is a mob front.

I look forward to your proving these two very numerical claims. But you can't just count existing criminal proceeds. That'd be saying, "The current level of speeding is so low that we can get rid of traffic cops." You have to measure the crime prevented, too.

Somehow I doubt that causes many problems in trying to collect from clients.

It really is. People flee high-crime/high-corruption countries for good reason. They also have demonstrably worse economies over the long term. KYC/AML efforts are only part of the difference, of course. But we've ended up with KYC/AML because it's one of the least intrusive ways of keeping crime in check.

If you think otherwise, I encourage you to go live in a high-crime/high-corruption country and let me know how much you're enjoying the "freedom".

Sure cute games can be made about the semantics of it, but that's why we have human beings as judges. It's blatantly obvious that when you threaten to toss someone in a cage for not doing something that you are imposing that on them, it's not voluntary and you are doing it on behalf of the imposer. If a human being judge truly can't recognize that then the whole system is broken and we need to start over.