hnthrow1010

>That's not the case for every country on the planet

It's not helping there either. Countries where the economy is strictly controlled by the government, like North Korea, are mainly using crypto and defi to centralize even more. Their government can use defi to steal from other countries with impunity, evading international laws while continuing to oppress their own citizens and disallowing them from using the internet.

>And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?

If it were done through a bank (or a law-abiding crypto exchange) they would be required to keep a log of the transaction and the legal identities of the participants, as well as a log of where the money came from and where it's going. The idea is, if buying the painting is just one of the steps to "clean" the money, they'll be able to trace it back to when the money was dirty.

Transactions and storage of money are already decentralized, through the traditional finance system that connects at least thousands of banks and payment processors and other financial institutions. So it can't be that.

>You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.

Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.

>Your favourite castle is motte and bailey?

Less of this, please. Obviously, not everyone into crypto and defi says those exact words. But there are enough saying that type of thing, where I think it's wrong of anyone involved with this to feign ignorance. They know what they're getting into.

I really don't think you want to continue the discussion in the direction of "what's wrong crime A and crime B", that'll get off the rails very quickly.

By association, yes. All cryptocurrency and "defi" ostensibly has that goal. What is it exactly you think they're trying to "decentralize"?

If they're smart, they wouldn't admit to it publicly. But do you not remember the early history of Bitcoin, and the Silk Road? Nothing's changed since then, except some people got arrested and some haven't yet.

When the "artists" have been openly and shamelessly stating, since around 2009, that the entire purpose of their "art" is to aid in laundering money and other crimes? Yes, absolutely.

Basically, the "sanction preventions" Aave is instituting are for show only, in hopes they fool the regulators. They'll annoy and disturb the casual crypto trader but will do nothing to stop the big criminals from money laundering. I hope the developers of these defi lending protocols get hit with the criminal charges next.

Sorry but I try to avoid dumping huge amounts of information on people in every comment, that often doesn't go down well either if you can imagine. If you want more I'll elaborate. There is no possible way you can deploy this service anywhere while effectively complying with AML laws. It isn't going to work. But it's also the only real effective way you can obscure the source of transactions on a blockchain that's forced to be public. There's no reason transactions need to be forced public in the first place, other than how blockchain designers insisted it was a fundamental design parameter, when you probably agree that it isn't and that some transactions should be private by default. The simple solution is to avoid all blockchains and cryptocurrency altogether. Yes, they are that bad. I wish it wasn't true and I could say something good about them, but I just can't after watching 13 years of bad things happen.

And no, things like monero and zcash aren't a working solution to this problem either, that's a whole different discussion though.

No, there are no other real applications for these mixers. The only reason you even need to do that on a public blockchain is because the design of them is so bad that there's no other practical way to have privacy without enabling large amounts of criminal activity. If you really care about privacy, and you don't like criminals, then just don't use any blockchains or cryptocurrency.

Are you making software that has the explicit stated purpose of facilitating illegal money laundering, like these crypto mixers openly say they do? If not, then you don't have anything to worry about from these sanctions.

>Exfiltrating money from foreign regimes, etc.

Crypto isn't useful for that. The thing that's actually useful for that is the illegal, unregulated exchange that's making the trade. It doesn't matter what currency they trade it for, it could be anything else besides crypto tokens. Crypto actually just adds extra unnecessary steps because the end goal is almost always to get it back out in another local currency. Unless you plan to get the money and then only spend it on NFTs.

If you ask me, they should all be shut down for selling unregistered securities, because all crypto tokens fit closest to that definition more than anything else. It's impossible for these tokens to actually function as a currency, both technically and legally. They're not a new class of assets, the idea of tradable tokens is not new either.

Ok, thanks. I get what you mean, but English language diffs can easily be falsified with a thesaurus :) A better analogy might be that every comment should be like a unique algorithm, or something along those lines.