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Comment by Mengkudulangsat | Hacker News Reader

I'm of the opinion that money remaining fungible is of more importance to modern economies than preventing money laundering.

If crimes are performed to obtain such money, then the crimes are abhorrent no doubt. However the sending and receipt of said money afterwards, in-and-of-itself should not be a crime.

I believe it is not money laundering that is causing asset bubbles in specific jurisdictions, but the enforcement of anti-money laundering measures worldwide that is causing such illicit capital to concentrate to jurisdictions where avenues to launder them is accessible.

If the proceeds of crime can be spent in the jurisdictions where the crime took place, illicit capital will not cause asset bubbles.

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That's a strange argument to make. These money-laundering fueled asset bubbles are caused because money-laundering is illegal? So if we make money laundering legal, then the dirty money will be spread out across all economies rather than concentrated where oversight is weakest?

The whole point of money laundering laws is that you make it difficult for criminals to use the profits from crime. If you remove that barrier, you've instantly made it far more lucrative to commit the underlying crimes. Secondly, tracking the money is how a lot of organized crime is uncovered in the first place. Removing financial controls would make it far more difficult to catch corruption, fraud, terrorism, human-trafficking, etc. committed by international criminal organizations.

It may be a game of whack-a-mole trying to prevent loopholes where criminals can launder their ill-gotten gains. But to do nothing would be far worse.

I'm against financial controls & blocking of transactions, I'm not against tracking or supervision of financial institutions.

If we encourage use, ironically it will make tracking a lot easier.

I doubt money laundering related charges themselves are the sole reason criminals are hesitant to spend their proceeds out in the open. Doing so would still lead to suspicion and possible investigations for the underlying criminal activity. Therefore, making money laundering related activity legal probably isn't going to accomplish what you want, and after seeing the decades of crime paying off for Paul Manafort, I'm of the opinion that we are in dire need of a serious crackdown on white collar crime, not a relaxation.

To me it makes more sense to destroy said money, which in effect creates a slight deflation and makes everyone richer. Money is not zero-sum after all, it's created and deleted all the time.

Within a country, it's preferable to address the crime, not the flow of the money, but what do you do if a foreign government is complicit in the crime? Shouldn't governments do their best to turn away dirty money?

Free flow of capital and trade is one of the best way to deescalate conflict between nations, and is something both sides should restrain from interfering no matter how much they hate each other.

A China-US-type confrontation is much preferable over an Iran-US-type confrontation.

ah I wrote a similar response highlighting the massive resources spent on whitelisting transactions

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