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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

A) they do, but B) cash doesn't scale terribly well. Think a million $ in cash is cool? How do you spend it?

You can't really take it to a bank. You can buy a cheap banger (car), but forget wandering into a dealership and dropping 25k in cash. (Apart from anything else, they'd be worried the cash was stolen or counterfeit.)

Travelling with it is risky. Flying especially. And in the US there's the danger of confiscation by the police. Everywhere else there's confiscation by the public as well.

You can't buy a house. Certainly no shares or most other assets. Hotels, maybe, depending ion the hotel. Nothing too fancy.

Groceries sure. Day to day expenses, sure. Just no Amazon.

Like I say, cash just doesn't scale well (despite what you see in the movies.)

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If you were dealing in a constant supply of cash you would have front organizations setup to launder it. A bunch of small businesses that normally do a lot of cash sales, then you get to deposit it in a bank (and pay taxes on it) like any other business.

You don't give millions to one person, you give $30k to 15,000 agents around the world, and that's one percent of your GDP right there.

You probably don't have 15000 'agents' that need $30k in cash and you expose every single one of them to an unnecessary risk if they get caught with fake money. Somewhat similar case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Nickel_Case

I think the entire point of the super dollar is that it is basically impossible to tell from a legitimate $100 bill, save from checking for duplicate/non-existent serial numbers.

Counterfeit cash adds risk to your agents. It also increases the chance they'll be tied back to you if they're caught. Also the operation to get them the money is, in itself, an expensive and difficult operation where the people doing the work probably need to be paid in real money.

None of those drawbacks mean it's a bad idea - just that it's not simple and ultimately comes back to fundamental questions of value exchange. I.e. Most of the time it costs fewer resources to exchange things for money on the black market than arranging to have extremely high quality forgeries in the hands of your agents.

>> but forget wandering into a dealership and dropping 25k in cash.

Motorcycles. Work at a motorcycle dealership and you will see customers with cash for a 10 to 25k$ motorcycle. Also, in the middle east it is normal to spend cash on even large items. A Saudi millionaire wanting to buy a car with $200,000 of cash is not unusual.

yes, and transactions over a sum much less than 200K require AML/KYC paperwork.

Which is fine. A legit buyer wanting to pay cash doesn't really care if the dealer has to file some extra paperwork.

Only in the US.

No, not only in the US. But granted, not everywhere.

KYC/AML is literally only law in the US and US licensed banking infrastructure. They are the US terms.

Other countries have their own terms for what they’re doing, and they aren’t the same terms.

The confusing part is that due to the US dollars reach, a LOT of foreign banks are US ‘licensed’ in order to interact with the US banking infrastructure, so there is some degree of it they need to apply in some cases. But it’s still US law only, and they don’t apply it in general.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/know-your-custome...

https://www.austrac.gov.au/business/core-guidance/customer-i...

https://rulebook.centralbank.ae/en/rulebook/167-know-your-cu...

https://www.dowjones.com/professional/risk/glossary/know-you...

Aka since 1970 in the US.

That a few close allies cut-n-pasted the terms decades later doesn’t change it.

> How do you spend it?

Sell it to a cartel at a steep discount. They’re experts at dealing with large globs of cash.

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