I don't see what's dumb about it. It seems like blacklisting is the digital equivalent of "I don't want to do business with criminals" - I wouldn't knowingly buy anything from a thief, or from a store that knows some of its suppliers are thieves. If law enforcement has seized the property and auctioned it, then the criminals aren't profiting, so I don't mind.
The point is that when a government seizes crypto funds and auctions them off again, the funds are clean for legal purposes but transaction history doesn’t change, it just has an additional transaction.
Software that flags aspects of transaction is nullified by the reality that it doesn't actually know that one subsequent transaction cleaned the whole trail. There are hundreds of thousands of governments around the world when factoring in municipal authorities, even governments you don't respect are cleaning funds in the eyes of governments you do respect. In the eyes of the requirements of exchanges that have these automated chain analysis practices. Right now, only a handful of governments do crypto investigations and seizures, but as this increases it only moves towards the nullifying chain analysis, as many funds will be comingled with a flagged transaction but unknown to the software about how these funds have been washed by a nation state’s blessings.
If you don't want to do business with criminals, don't buy crime futures. Because that's essentially what crypto are (unless not held and only purchased on demand for whatever oddball transaction you'd want to do that's neither speculation nor directly related to crime): demand outside of pure speculation (which is certainly by far the biggest part) must be completely dominated by demand for paying ransoms, purchasing illegal substances and so on.
Even if "your" tokens are perfectly clean, straight from an artisanal miner running their rig purely on solar surplus or something like that, their value still derives almost exclusively from crime use cases, hidden behind no matter how many layers of zero-sum speculation.
> business with criminals, don't buy crime futures
Is your Crime same as my Crime?
Suppose I am a software developer living in Russia and I don’t want to pay taxes to a government that commits war crimes, is that a crime? Should a western bank be preventing that?
Suppose you were protesting in a dictatorship, and as a result your assets were seized, you have a criminal record, maybe you are collecting donations, should I as a western bank act to stop that ‘crime’?
Even simpler if you want to buy some weed, it’s a crime in country A but not in country B. Suppose so live in Country B, should I be concerned?
> Suppose I am a software developer living in Russia and I don’t want to pay taxes to a government that commits war crimes, is that a crime? Should a western bank be preventing that?
Yes, because that activity cannot be distinguished from thd Russian government evading financial sanctions. It sucks for the innocent party but there are many victims of their government with more serious grievances.
> Suppose you were protesting in a dictatorship, and as a result your assets were seized, you have a criminal record, maybe you are collecting donations, should I as a western bank act to stop that ‘crime’?
This has the same problem plus the gross negligence of advising anyone living under a repressive government to use a financial system designed to leave an immutable trail for the police to use when prosecuting them and everyone they know. The full retroactive deanonymization is incredibly dangerous for dissidents since it allows the authorities to prosecute them for transactions they made even before they were suspected of anything.
> Yes, because that activity cannot be distinguished from thd Russian government evading financial sanctions.
I am not sure this is true, but regardless I was going for a moral angle - the question was basically: Suppose a western bank was 100% certain that it was not Russian government avoiding sanctions, would that still apply?
I think in that hypothetical case you could say it’s morally okay with some debate over how much participating in the economy matters, but I don’t think that tells us much about the real world because how would you ever get anywhere close to 100% certainty that you are actually talking to the person you believe you are, they aren’t compromised, and that the government isn’t waiting to confiscate those funds? Unless the goal is just to stash money in a foreign account until you can escape the country there’s no way to avoid a fairly high level of risk trying to use it in country.
