Bitcoin Forum

I just came across these responses from CipherTrace in regards to FATF Regulation and found this point in particular quite interesting esp in regards to tracking the customer rather than just one address/wallet

Do you think this is fair?

https://ciphertrace.com/response-to-fatf-on-vasp-regulation/

I would imagine the number to be higher but 1k seems fair especially if it's from the same person

1000 is a really small number they will need a lot of time and resources to track every small payment.

I don't think this is reasonable both from the point of view of the authorities and us users. What are they going to do? Ask every account holder where they are spending every $1000? Maybe it's a new TV or a washing machine :D

If you are going to track a wallet then it goes to a mixer then every trace will be lost. So it's better to track someone rather than tracking a wallet since it's pretty easy to make so many wallets for only one user. Its only fair for those who are not into money laundering and making a decent income over cryptocurrency so there is no need to fear about FATF.

As crypto becomes more popular these tracking services will become the norm. 1000 is a low amount in crypto, but in fiat it sounds about right

It is exactly the response from ciphertrace. I do even think that it is useless to track someone based on the value amount of the transaction which is so low in value. A user usually has family/friend who are not involved in this industry so the user can use their family/friend identity to split the amount in order to avoid transaction over $1,000 so it wont be considered as user who should not be tracked. I mean, it is not effective idea from FATF.

Possible. Governments are focusing on regulating the crypto market in whatever way possible, but extreme regulations could lead to an invasion of privacy which would not go down well with many people including me.

Monitoring such movements is fine in my opinion as long as they don't change it whenever they want for their own benefit.

It depends on a country. For example for Venezuela it is a huge money. But considering that they are evaluating investments in USD and EUR they are talking about EU and US then it is a small amount of money.
For example  there is a huge amount of some usual goods and services in US cost over 1$k that you can pay for with cash. Banks can't trace your cash flow and no one really cares for what you are buying for this 1$k. So why should anyone care about crypto?

Maybe that's why the amount is so low. 1000$ is not a big amount when talking about crypto indeed. Not big money even when we talk about money laundering.
But if you want to find the ones hiding 100,000s of USD you have to start somewhere and with lower value to start with you'll catch also the ones using friends and family names for splitting the transactions.

that is most probably because their goal has nothing to do with money laundering although they may say otherwise. one of the main goals is usually taxation and basically catching those who are evading their tax payment so that they can prosecute them specially if they were running some sort of business or earning mechanism that generated them a considerable amount of money over time with bitcoin price rise.

I believe Ciphertrace uses some sort of computer program to track movements so I doubt they analyze every 1k movement but instead have some sort of signal if movements are continuous at that amount. Just my guess though.

Indeed 1000 is a small number and i think they should monitor higher amounts over 5000 or over 10000 because this can be more accurate and help better people who see high movement than 1000.

Interesting. I think in the near future this will be catalyst to:

- Higher demand for DEX since you won't have to submit KYC in these platforms.
- Higher demand on privacy coins like the ones article mentioned, Zcash, Monero, etc (so, in a way, this "news" is kinda bullish for privacy coins?).

Maybe in the future these agencies will start a full crackdown on privacy coins and decentralized exchanges. The system won't give up until they can completely crush the concept of 'anonimity' and 'privacy' in the crypto sphere.

I also believe that it is the sad future and more and more crypto transactions are being tracked. So the anonymity of crypto will give up more and more and I don't like that. The amount of 1000USD/EUR I find very small, but in the future also still small amounts will be tracked. The more data is collected, the easier it will be to allocate even small amounts of crypto more quickly.  ::)

I guess its not that much fair, in my country its above 5 thousand dollars and if you do make them the first couple of them may not even get tracked because nobody cares about only a few but if you constantly do it than it gets stuck and your bank blocks it and the government checks it.

I even know a fairly professional businessman who has a job building roller coasters, as his job is rare in between but pays a lot dude gets to build like 5 roller coasters a year and sells it all over the world and of course since its super expensive he gets money sent to him in bulk and every time he gets the money from whichever country he builds it the money gets stuck for like 2 weeks and he has to show invoice. 1000 Euro is just way too little for those people who work for other countries.

in the USA, suspicious activity reports (SAR) can be triggered at $5k and currency transaction reports (CTR) are filed at $10k. so these constitute much lower thresholds than ever before. i sure hope this doesn't become the standard.

i can't imagine how/why they would spend resources to track such small amounts of money!

The way I read this, it sounds like they're recommending exchanges implement in-depth KYC procedures (and possibly report transactions to authorities?!) above a 1,000 USD/EUR daily withdrawal limit. Am I reading this wrong? I'm not positive what CDD entails but I know it's a subset of KYC:

They are worried, they understand that cryptocurrencies if allowed to grow freely and without any supervision have the potential to change the economy and since governments have a monopoly when it comes to printing money they are the ones that will be the most affected by this independent currency, but it does not matter what they do people that are determined to avoid being monitored are going to find ways to avoid this, which means their efforts will be in vain.

I can see where you are coming from and how this sort of situation might make it a catalyst to both a dex and privacy coins. I think people within the community are already pushing for privacy coins but I also think companies like ciphertrace are warning them that if they can't meet compliance standards someone will likely step in soon

Not especially keen on this idea because it leads onto other developments which can end in presumptive justice and confiscation by overly powerful authorities.    The 10k limit or reporting rule in USA for example then expands into a law where people are accused of avoiding it if seen to be transferring 9000 in multiple amounts for example.   People can and have been arrested and lost their cash take from a retail business just for the idea they might be drug dealers where all they did was sell retail products to customers mostly using cash.   A victim of their own success they become suspects alongside criminals.

Its bad enough we have miscarriages of justice for actual crimes, to then introduce the possibility of thought crimes or presuming negatives for moving value whether its 900 or 1100 is quickly a disaster.     This whole  concept seeping into crypto is negative, similarly kyc is used aggressively against individuals caught in the cross fire of red tape between corporations and regulators.
   Few rights are gifted to those now required to obey these arbitrary rules, though it seems harmless enough to begin with and even some positive it quickly becomes about big government and massive corporations crushing the people and small entities unable through size to fight back, trying to continue without becoming illegal or presumed criminal by simply existing and operating normally.   Its kinda sad how this dilemma continues, Im sure better solutions exist then more rules

Too low I think. They should try to make it higher than 1000.
I'm not sure if they are trying to be manipulative on this part but I could see the positive advantage of it.
They're requiring KYC for the security and safety of every transaction.
However, if every crypto transactions would be tracked I guess there would be lapses on crypto traders and investors part.

What are your thoughts in regards to dealing with large exit scams or money laundering in general? Do we just ignore them and let it happen? What if we could avoid them in the first place

This is not about if it should be monitored or not this is about anything more than 1000 and that number is just way too little.

If are afraid of the exit scams and/or money laundering that is less than 1000 euro/dollar per bank account than you are missing out the fact that most of those things happen in millions of dollars and even hundreds of millions of dollars and banks help them get that laundered as well for share of the prize (Deutsche bank for example) whereas small people who are not doing anything bad and get like 3-5 thousand in their bank account suddenly searched for money laundering, nobody really launders 5 thousand dollars, that is just way too small, people launder millions of dollars. That is why I think this would hurt regular people instead of stopping money launderers.

I just wonder how that want to track my transaction on the blockchain, for the fact that they see the transaction on the blockchain doesn't mean that they can actually track those who owns that wallet and that way will not be able to tax anyone, the earlier this agencies knows that it is mission impossible to be able to totally control all of the transaction carried out on the blockchain, the better for them, the best they can do is regulate exchanges.