Everytime crypto gets harangued as a money laundering cesspool, I think of HSBC’s highest performing branch in Sinaloa and Germany’s fintech giant payment processor run by a GRU spy. As in two money laundering behemoths right out in the regulated open. Give me a break.
- HSBC was fined about
$2.5b all in all by US govt in 2010’s (one of largest ever) for laundering $900m for cartels over multiple years. The Sinaloa branch (not NYC, Zurich, Greenwich, London… but Sinaloa) was their highest performing branch for a long stretch
- Why exactly would a German unicorn payment processors’ COO be a longterm agent… GRU’s infiltration of German finance and energy industry for laundering and energy markets access is an open secret.
I think that the separation of the power to issue a currency from the state is profoundly dangerous, undermines the source of legitimacy of our society, and likely to destroy any possibility of a kind and fulfilling world for billions of people.
The current form of money that we use relies on the structure and status of the states that issue it, and the relationships that they have with one another. This is not positive in every way, for example the military dominance of the United States underpins the value of the dollar internationally. However, some measure of democratic accountability additional to brute force and pure market economics has allowed some diversion of wealth to create some measure of social justice.
I think there is no sign at all that crypto will provide this and instead if it was allowed to run wild the world would be ruled by people like Elon Musk with no restraint.
Fwiw, this is one of the few very valid risk areas that crypto indicates as a logical outcome if it works fully. The other is debt-deflation spirals.
A lot of crypto people don’t care about this, or see “democratic accountability” as an excuse for (in it’s worst version) Venezuela, or in its most likely version a decade plus of 0.0001% savings rates for the common man b/c our democratic system decided it’d have to work that way for a bit.
