Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2

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.

"A recent one being Trumps payments to the porn star."

Trump's crime was in how he reported the payment in a government form, not that he made a payment. So if that's what you want: more laws and thus more laws being broken so that the state has more justification to prosecute people, then yes, financial surveillance laws are effective.

Yes people have been caught using information gleaned through dragnet financial surveillance, but there is no evidence that this surveillance has reduced the total volume of crime. Organized crime for instance doesn't seem any weaker than it was in the past, despite the absolutely enormous sacrifice in privacy and free association rights that much of the world has been forced to endure.

As for crypto and crime, yes crypto crimes were not a thing before crypto existed. The same could be said of cyber crime. It only came into existence with the internet.

But this is just a phenomenon of moving crime from meatspace to crypto space. The pickpockets have just moved into the digital asset space. It doesn't mean a net increase in crime.

We need to go after criminals, but not at the expense of privacy rights. There is no excuse for it, when crypto scammers already leave so much evidence that can be used to track them.

Giving up privacy is giving up a free society. It is also creating profound risks of abuse of power by people with official state power, who gain the ability to search people's private financial activity without a warrant.