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Comment by Kinnard | Hacker News Reader

It may be a billion dollar problem but it's a billion dollar problem like tax software, it wouldn't exist without the troll demanding his toll. The resources could be used elsewhere like on curing disease or on educating people: http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/money-laundering-is-...

It's a billion dollar problem that doesn't need to exist.

Many people will probably make cursory argument that taxes(and by analogy ML regulation) are a necessary evil(They're now doing the troll's work for him)— I'd argue they are not necessary and they short-circuit us working on better replacements.

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The troll is money laundering, not the regulation. And you can't ignore the troll, or even get rid of it, so you must mitigate damage.

"Money laundering" is an imaginary crime. If certain patterns of transactions were not arbitrarily outlawed, there would be no need to enforce this law.

All kinds of fraud and theft of money from credit card and banking account data are very real crimes, and for them the main effective method of detection is following the money trail, and the main effective method of prevention is making the laundering hard, since already laundering is the difficult part that limits the scale of such operations, not the actual theft/fraud.

Wonder why there is such thing as spam of "earn $$$ working from home handling bills online" ? It's because someone there has excess capacity to steal money, but not enough capacity to launder it.

Only in the sense that all crimes are "imaginary." Crimes are acts made illegal by law, which money laundering is. It's as illegal as murder.

Certainly you're not comparing tax evasion to murder?

Insofar as the logical basis for classifying them as "crimes," yes, I am. Not in terms of seriousness or morality, obviously. Also, conflating money laundering and tax evasion shows a serious lack of understanding. Tax evasion can involve money laundering, sure, but money laundering is often the mechanism used to enable far more serious crimes, including, yes, murder.

Many things "enable" murder, including cars, guns, bullets, knives, etc. In any case this utilitarianism is a dead end. If it is not absolutely fungible, it's not money, it's coupons, food stamps, tokens, but not money and will not ultimately be used as such.

I agree and would add that trade via currency is in all cases voluntary. Prosecution of "money laundering" is a standard tool in the tool belt of all collectivist regimes who ultimately find it necessary to attempt to control as much activity as is technologically feasible.

How so?

But in the real world AML isn't going away, and it continues to be expensive.

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