The world’s financial system ought to stop criminals from dealing drugs, funding terrorism, and skipping out on taxes.
Ah, no ... whoever said that is an idiot. This is the fundamentally flawed reasoning underlying many of the misguided prognostications and actions we see in this area. If it is the job of the financial system to do all this criminal catching and law enforcement ... what the heck do we need cops for?
It is only since the arrival of digital ledger-based money such concepts are even entertained. How ridiculous would it be to point at a gold coin or a dollar bill and say "this money ought to be stopping criminal gangs from roaming the globe doing bad stuffs to us all!"? They have conflated the payments system function of digital money with the value systems, moral dogma and legal systems. It is now one unholy, unworkable mess that will inevitably cease to function as a payments system, or as a monetary system.
Let law enforcement do law enforcement well and let monetary systems do monetary functions well ... conflating the two is just making cops lazy and getting monetary systems bogged down in an impossible quest for utopia that will ultimately become dysfunctional as money.
