The so-called anti-money laundering push is actually a manifestation of Total Information Awareness, applied to value transfer. It's completely unconstitutional and extremely dangerous.<p>It began in 1989, with leaders of the G7 agreeing at a summit to create the FATF. It has, by at least one account, become one of the least effective policy experiments in history:<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...</a>.<p>There is a reason that historically, the state needed a warrant, issued by a court, before it could conduct a search. Allowing the state to conduct dragnet surveillance creates the kind of power imbalance that ensures growing income equality and social instability.<p>The need for the state to obtain a warrant before conducting a search was seen as striking the right balance between the need to maintain reasonable checks on the power of the state, and the need to investigate crime. And in one summit, all of that was cast aside.<p>Any actual incident of money laundering involves some underlying crime that generated the illicit revenue. To prove money laundering occurred, you need to prove that the underlying crime occurred.<p>So an AML law is redundant. Any actual money laundering that is proven would land the party involved in prison, for the underlying crime.<p>But the so-called AML laws do not require proving money laundering occurred. It only requires proving that a person did not comply with the AML-related disclosure requirements, i.e. not complying with warrantless mass-surveillance. The crime is privacy.
I saw a very interesting take on nfts a while back and why the market will continue to exist and persist. A significant part of the art market is driven by money laundering activities, Nfts have allowed this process to become digitized so that they don't require the physical underlying, which requires storage and handling and shopping costs, anymore
With Hunter Biden taking the art world by storm - <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/06/15/hunter-bidens-artwork-is-actually-good-experts-say/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2021/06/15/hunter-bidens-artwork-is-actua...</a> - I don't know if this is a good or bad thing.<p>It's good to ensure his art doesn't end up in the hands of criminals but at the same time, does this depress the value of art overall?