Comment by olalonde 3 days ago
The crazy thing about money laundering laws is that in many jurisdictions, just failing to prove the legitimate origin of your funds can be enough to lose assets, and face criminal prosecution, without the state ever proving an underlying crime. It effectively shifts the burden of proof.
Seriously, why would you have a problem explaining where a $5M came from?
In most places this is "proceeds of crime", requiring associated convictions.
In places that have unexplained wealth statutes, the bar is also pretty high - "balance of probabilities" is not hard to argue IF YOU HAVE LEGITIMATE SOURCES OF MONEY.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
I believe he wasn't just emphasizing, he was yelling specifically.
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
It is extremely simple to prove legitimate origin of funds though.
You're acting like the government will charge you for a $100 in your wallet.
Any circumstance where the onus is on a private citizen to prove innocence instead of the government to prove guilt is a perversion of justice. Stupid voters and the government will destroy all privacy for the sake of "the guns, the gangs, the children"
It's extremely simple until it's not. Let's say you bought 100$ worth of BTC back in 2012 with cash at a meetup. Now it’s worth $1M, but you can't prove its origin. You now have a perfectly law-abiding person that risks being accused of "money laundering" just to keep what's rightfully theirs.
I've had this exact problem before, though not with such high amounts. To make it worse, it was Monero rather than Bitcoin, which made tracing impossible. In the end, I just had to produce emails/documents proving I was paid in crypto a couple years back & the associated increase in value since then. I got the crypto into my bank via a sketchy non-kyc exchange and somehow they didn't care about that at all.
Bitcoin literally has an immutable transaction record baked into it's model.
You would be able to point to the timestamp when you took possession of the wallet which would prove providence unambiguously.
There's no KYC to take possession of a wallet, how would you prove the wallet wasn't just traded to you (maybe even yesterday) instead of moving the bitcoins?
That works until it does not. What if you transferred the BTC to other wallets or exchanges in the meanwhile? Even if you still had access to the original wallet, what proves that it was really yours? etc.
Monero? Zano? (if you could actually see that monero actually hasn't been hacked as people say and it was all just a marketing gimick though I'd still be cautious and maybe keep my money in monero short term??)
Your other replies rely on "assume the government has powers it does not and/or the judiciary is willing to suspend the burden of proof in criminal cases". I mean... yeah. It's true. If you assume we live in a totalitarian dystopia then sure, the government can do terrible things.
But needless to say such a government doesn't need to pass boring AML laws to do that. It can just throw you in jail because it wants to. The actual rule of law under which we live doesn't have that property.
No, some financial institutions like Binance only allows clients to get statements for the last year or so. P2P transaction details go back only a couple of months.
Sometimes your employer goes out of business. Employees do not always preserve their payslips.
Then there are countries like Georgia, it's culturally acceptable to buy real estate with cash. If no valuation of the property was made, it becomes very difficult to prove where the money came from.
One of my favourite stats is that assets lost to forfeiture overtook assets lost to crime in the US
https://www.nemannlawoffices.com/blog/law-enforcement-seized...