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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone knows where the real money laundering and terrorist financing happens.

> It is done by the likes of HSBC, Standard Chartered and other big banks.

This used to be the case. And undoubtedly it still goes on. There simply weren’t many other mechanisms to launder money that didn’t involve large banks…until crypto joined the party.

Crypto’s most popular feature is speculation, and its second most popular feature is money laundering/capital control evasion. These two probably encompass well in excess of 99% of typical real world use cases.

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There are some things the government can't realistically do. Like taxing oxygen consumption or preventing people thinking things. Or how they have been totally unable to stop tax evasion for thousands of years.

I'd be more than happy if controlling capital joined the list of things government just can't do. I think freely flowing capital is going to be good for everyone. Good luck to the crypto community & I'm sure a big chunk of the world trying to get away from unreasonable US sanctions will agree.

> I think freely flowing capital is going to be good for everyone.

The US and 'west' is already financially liberal, so we can make an observation: it is NOT good for everyone. Capital flows freely, but it flows upwards. Trickle-down economics is proven false. Advocating for more liberal finances also means being okay with leaving people behind and in the shit; the unemployed, the homeless, the working poor, the huge percentage of people who constantly live one paycheck or one medical issue away from bankruptcy, the people who work 16 hours a day at multiple jobs and still can't make ends meet, etc etc etc.

I mean to rephrase your claim, yeah capital / money should flow freely, but egalitarian. The wealth of an individual should benefit all. The richest countries in the world shouldn't have poverty on an individual level. There shouldn't be a case where a handful of people have more money than half the world population.

And I get it, building a space company and launching yourself into space is cool, but that money could also have gone to your employees to lift them out of poverty and insecurity.

I don't buy the theory that someone else being well off makes me badly off. I also don't buy the theory that someone else being badly off should make me feel bad.

Capital controls aren't going to help the unemployed, the homeless, the working poor, the huge percentage of people who constantly live one paycheck or one medical issue away from bankruptcy. Capital controls will make those problems worse; forcing people to make bad decisions with their investments is not the fast track to getting great long term results.

Some form of capital control is necessary for taxation. Without efficient taxation all of the people you mention are going to be extra fucked.

There are capital controls and then there are capital controls - but preventing you from moving all of your money out of the country to avoid taxes is still a control on capital.

> I don't buy the theory that someone else being well off makes me badly off

You mean the theory of...mathematics? More money in one place necessarily means less money in another.

If I sell a product for 100€ but only pay my worker 20€ to make it, I'm becoming rich. If my worker wants to buy that product, it costs them 5x their salary, but only costs me 1.4x. If all my CEO friends do the same for their products, the workers are becoming poor because of us becoming rich.

Now let's stop trying to be rich. Let's lower the margins and sell the product for 40€. Now it's 2x my salary (marginally worse for me), but also only 2x my worker's salary (much better for them). Let's say all of us CEOs do that. By not being rich, we've allowed our workers to be less poor.

You assume economics is a zero sum game. Which I don't think is even remotely proven.

To not make it zero-sum, money would need to either have to be created in a transaction or somehow raise its value. The former clearly doesn't happen and is a terrible idea and the latter doesn't either and even if it did, it would affect both sides (rich an poor) equally (as a ratio, not absolute) and therefore even widen the gap in purchasing power.

Money is literally created every day. It's exceedingly easy in fact.

Yes, but because the amount in circulation goes up, the value of it goes down. And it's not like the money that is created benefits the poor - it just allows rich people to borrow more probably make even more money from their "investments".

There's plenty of things that cannot be completely prevented, and we don't take that to mean that all counter measures are futile and should be dropped.

Examples are basically any kind of crime and violence, traffic accidents, all kinds of things that harm people and societies.

> There are some things the government can't realistically do. Like taxing oxygen consumption or preventing people thinking things.

Ya think ? People are indoctrinated from as soon as they start school. By the time they reach adulthood they are fully institutionalized.

> I'm sure a big chunk of the world trying to get away from unreasonable US sanctions will agree

You might not agree with every use of US financial might, but I do not think that a “big chunk” of the world are affected by US sanctions or that a big chunk disagree with US sanctions that exist. Most of these sanctions are against demonstrably hostile governments. The US isn’t perfect by any means, but cutting off NK, Iran, etc from international banking to extract nuclear compliance is, I think, a good use of sanctions.

By user count (as opposed to volume), ransomware is almost certainly a bigger use case of Bitcoin than money laundering and friends.

Hackers user crypto for ransomware because they can easily launder the ransom payments.

It's the same side of the coin.

Do you have sources to back up this claim?

I would argue its second most popular feature is purchases on dark net markets. This has been a constant theme since bitcoin was first released and I think is always discounted when talking about the currency.

Is there a way to reliably figure out the GDP of dark net markets?

Kinda; if the dark net markets have known wallet addresses it can be looked up and analyzed in the blockchain. Or if the other public addresses are known, transactions can be deducted from them.

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