Hacker News Reader

"...but I don't share the government's concerns about things like laundering."

I get that you, personally, aren't concerned about money laundering... But can you at least understand, in principle, why governments are concerned about money laundering?

View on HN

He may be alluding to the fact that money laundering is easier to get away with using regular trace-less cash than through an immutable public ledger where your criminal activity is stored in perpetuity.

That would be a remarkable inversion of the standard Bitcoin argument: for years, the argument was that Bitcoin was more anonymous, and that the government simply had no business determining the legitimacy of transactions.

(The factuality of these claims is not being offered or challenged; only the observation that the justification seems to have completely flipped.)

That depends on the scale. At a small scale, cash works best for laundering, but it is hard to scale and doesn't work remotely.

Money laundering is a place where scale matters. Having the anonymity of cash creates privacy at the individual level but it's scaling issues are actually a feature that limit abuse.

Their concern is of no value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com