Comment by ETH_start
I may be misunderstanding your point, but there’s no law requiring individuals to report their financial transactions to the state. That requirement applies to banks, not peer-to-peer exchanges like cash or crypto. The fact that these regulations even exist is disturbing. They essentially allow people who work for certain state agencies to monitor everyone’s banking-based financial activity without a warrant, something that should never have been normalized.
These banking rules should be scrapped. They force people to give up their privacy and prove their innocence before they can transact. This is a blatant infringement on individual freedom, and it only benefits people who might abuse such powers, as agents of overreaching governments.
When it comes to fighting crime, there is no evidence that dragnet financial surveillance is effective. Criminals have been caught and prosecuted for centuries without the state needing to track every transaction. And since these laws were implemented, there is no evidence they have reduced the volume of financially motivated crime. Organized crime generates hundreds of billions of dollars worth of illicit revenue each year, despite all of the privacy that has been sacrificed.
There are far more focused ways to go after criminals without invading the privacy of the entire population. Law enforcement can geotrack scam websites, use undercover agents to gather evidence, and subpoena social media companies to get the information they need. These methods work, and they respect privacy. There’s no reason to burden everyone with blanket surveillance when the actual criminals leave plenty of other evidence.
Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive. We should repeal these invasive laws and return to a society that respects and protects the fundamental right to financial privacy.
There are in fact laws about individuals reporting cash transactions, such as when entering a country you must declare cash amounts over a certain threshold.
You keep saying that there is no evidence that financial records have ever been successfully used to find and prosecute criminal activity, but I hear about these being the case all the time. A recent one being Trumps payments to the porn star.
> And since these laws were implemented, there is no evidence they have reduced the volume of financially motivated crime.
The counter-point to this is that since the introduction of crypto, the volume of scams has increased - think of those big headline cases like SBF. And of course those countless ones where scammers sieze control of like a hospital's computer system demanding payment in, you guessed it, crypto. If crypto wasn't a thing, then those scams would be much much harder and riskier to execute to the point many wouldn't bother. But with crypto it becomes easier and less risky and the volume of these scams explodes.
I absolutely support privacy rights, but I also don't want people to be scammed because the system makes it easy for the scammers to scam.
An analogy might be that we don't need bank vaults because the police can just find the criminals after they've effortlessly stolen all the cash sitting in the unlocked and unguarded room. Rather than making the cash hard to steal in the first place.