I disagree. So much crime and corruption is uncovered through tracing financial transactions.. A world where a few mega power brokers who are untraceable, unaccountable, and untouchable by "the people" sounds super dystopian to me.
Right now, what's happening is a few mega power brokers are traceable, unaccountable, and untouchable by the people. Pretending that crypto somehow creates or enables crime when its sitting right under our noses (as our governments refuse to do anything about it), is frankly ridiculous.
My point was that the existing system (the banks) aren't trying to solve the problem so it's almost completely ineffective.
And the argument is that there comes a point when the drawbacks of trying to stop it becomes larger than the benefits we gain, and we should therefore do something else that gives us more benefits.
You might argue that we're not there yet, which is fine, but others will argue that it's time to try something else.
By doing "nothing", we gain other things such as financial privacy for everyone and making digital payments available for everyone. These are not insignificant things and if they're more valuable than the inefficient anti-laundering attempts then doing "nothing" would indeed be better.
Also we wouldn't truly be doing "nothing", we would only give up one traceability component and we can still chase crime in other ways, like requiring documents of where you got the money to buy this mansion.
Traditional sources only try to stop it from happening if the scale is small enough.
Basically traditional sources just incentivize organized crime that's less accountable to the justice system until they piss off the wrong people. Look at Deutsche bank.
Isn't it better to at least try and stop it instead of throwing in the towel? Can we agree that if something is bad, someone trying to stop it is better than not trying to stop it at all?
The idea that 'power players' can avoid prosecution by using cryptocurrency is absolutely untrue.
Once you grow that large, you get a lot of attention and suddenly it is economical to track you down, even if you are using 'untraceable' currency like Monero.
When you are a 'small' player, buying or selling small quantities of cannabis, it isn't worth the time to trace your transactions. The Justice Department is targeting everything, not just big-time criminals.
This seems like a prelude to a burdensome requirement for platforms to make it easier to execute warrants for crimes using cryptocurrency, which will sweep up everyone.
