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Comment by niceice | Hacker News Reader

How does that work exactly?

Have you ever tried to move $10MM between jurisdictions before? It's much easier when you can put it in a box that looks like, weighs as much as, and actually is a piece of cloth inside of a box, and then open the box up wherever you want it.

(To be clear, the banana piece specifically is probably a bad artwork to use for financial engineering purposes, but for the art market as a whole these dynamics add a lot to the prices near the top end)

that isn't money laundering though.

I wonder that too fwiw, what's the exact mechanism with this banana NFT-purchase by which elicit money (from who (?)) is now being laundered as legal income (of who (?)). How does the process work?

Again, I have no clue whether this banana falls into this category, but generically and hyper-simplified: you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10MM, you move that piece of art to a more permissive jurisdiction and sell it for $8MM. That buyer gets a good deal and you just mostly cleaned $10MM for 20% in one transaction, which you can then layer into its now-local (permissive) economy for further cleaning before pulling it back out, apparently legitimately, to whatever jurisdiction you want.

You've avoided an international (currency) transaction of $10MM which would be flagged by pretty much every authority with oversight. Just two high-value domestic art sales, which happen all the time.

> you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10M

How does the sale take place? Cash? So when the seller deposits the cash, no one asks where it came from?

It came from an art sale… you can go read an article about it in the news, in fact, and sure you may think it’s ridiculous but that’s just because you’re uncultured and don’t understand Fine Art. People are demonstrably willing to pay millions for bananas on walls.

Obviously it attracts some attention (we’re here talking about it), but a whole lot less than a wire transfer of $10MM out of the country which would trigger SARs at several levels.

Ah so why do the sale at all then? Why not just deposit $10MM in cash at the bank and say it was from an art sale? Something is missing in your explanation.

Are you an artist who'd pass KYC for doing $10MM art sales...? If so, then yeah, you probably could do that.

So you're just making things up as you go along? You haven't really explained the mechanics at all and are doing a lot of handwaving.

Any examples of this happening? Famous artwork being bought in us (high scrutiny preusmably) then sold in , i don't know, Switzerland (low scrutiny presumably). And then repatriated!!

Seems a lot of steps on the way.especially in crypto era.

Anyway, would love to see some real examples here. Why can't it just be exuberance, pumpanddump if we want to be cynical.

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