Hacker News Reader

Comment by luckydata | Hacker News Reader

This is not surprising. The minute Libra starts operating it becomes the main money laundering tool in the world. Depending on how it's implemented it could easily topple the economies of smaller countries, and significantly increase funding for terrorist organizations and garden variety criminals.

I don't see how any government, and especially the US government, agrees to any of that anytime soon.

View on HN

How will it become a main money laundering or terrorist tool? Can you elaborate?

A launderer or terrorist (actually ANYBODY - good or bad) would have to be the biggest fucking idiot to use Libra and expect the transaction to be anonymous or private.

I sincerely hope you were just whipping out the typical ML/T FUD and don't believe that yourself.

What does libra do for money laundering that other currencies like zcash and nano don't already do much better?

Guessing here, but potentially allow you to actually mix fraudulent funds into real (or seemingly real) transactions? Assuming people actual use Libra to buy stuff. To use a Breaking Bad example, the car wash cashier says 100 people paid $30 each for a car wash (and generates receipts for those) when only 10 cars actually showed up.

Zcash is great for anonymously moving money, but you can still trace the inputs and outputs since you ultimately need fiat to buy weapons and such.

Libra will almost surely be fungible on Facebook marketplace. I can easily think of a scheme to list fake stuff and use the money to buy it between two complicit parties or one. Do it at scale with bots, you have a great, completely automated way of squirrel away tons of money $10-15 at the time. Nobody would be able to effectively trace all those transactions if it's done well enough, and budget is not exactly an issue for the people involved in this kind of stuff.

Pretty sure the USD will remain the main money laundering tool in the world. The USD as cash is partly fungible, whereas Libra is not.

The only reason the Russian agents involved in the 2016 misinformation campaign got caught was because they used Bitcoin to purchase their equipment.

lol.. I don't think people realize how the legacy banking systems already facilitate this activity

HSBC was recently fined for laundering billions for the cartels. This activity happens on an industrial scale and a Facebook cryptocurrency isn't needed for these groups to move money.

I'm not sure how I should reply to this. You really believe I don't know how money laundering is currently performed?

Of course laundering already occurs. But that doesn't mean we should ignore things that could further enable it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com