impossible to answer that question - what if the 1% of activity continues to grow and encourages billions more dollars of pro-social economic activity in the future?
All we can know for sure is that shutting down a white-market financial service or worse, blacklisting its users, has the guarantee that innocent people will be harmed.
Further: disrupting a single avenue of finances for the funding of illicit activity at best slows down the criminals. The overwhelming majority of crime is financed in fiat and the overwhelming majority of laundering happens in fiat, which can't be "shutdown".
It's simply ineffective and hurts innocent people. I'm not in favor of hurting innocent people even with modest efficacy and I don't believe that's what we're seeing here. I believe we're hurting innocent people with little to no efficacy.
What's the legitimate use case for using cryptocurrency mixers? What would be this kind of activity that would grow and encourage "pro-social economic activity?" What harm is encountered by these innocent people?
From my perspective, an economically rational actor would want to minimize overall money transmission costs, so they'd avoid cryptocurrency mixers unless they had a particular reason to.
with open ledgers everyone can see your revenue. This isn't something businesses want to show competitors. Anything that can obscure your wallet (which gives away how much you own as well as shows income) can help obscure this data, which is extremely valuable to some types of businesses.
I'm sure there are other examples, but this is a good one off the top of my head and I personally have used mixers for this very purpose - to allow someone to pay me for a white-market trade without exposing how much crypto I owned in my wallet.
Hadn't considered the fact that wallet balances are public, but it seems like a rather niche need as opposed to having the ability to launder funds and irrevocably transfer them. The latter I believe is very appealing to people who are transferring proceeds from criminal activities.
Thanks for sharing though, I hadn't thought of wanting to hide one's wallet balance from other people as a need.
Yeah, no doubt it's attractive for money laundering, but the thing is that it's impossible to stop at this point. There are entire digital currencies built on top of zero-knowledge transactions at this point and they aren't hard to get your hands on those coins in my experience.
With that in mind, if in fact it's impossible to stop, it seems rather arbitrary to pick and choose which products get targeted and serves no real purpose to even slow down the undesired behavior.
That's a fair point. Not knowing much about the space, I assume that they picked an important mixer. If that's not the case, then maybe it's just for show and it won't have a meaningful impact, just like the war on drugs hasn't really stopped drugs from being consumed.
All we can know for sure is that shutting down a white-market financial service or worse, blacklisting its users, has the guarantee that innocent people will be harmed.
Further: disrupting a single avenue of finances for the funding of illicit activity at best slows down the criminals. The overwhelming majority of crime is financed in fiat and the overwhelming majority of laundering happens in fiat, which can't be "shutdown".
It's simply ineffective and hurts innocent people. I'm not in favor of hurting innocent people even with modest efficacy and I don't believe that's what we're seeing here. I believe we're hurting innocent people with little to no efficacy.