“OIG Investigators found that the DEA paid one airline employee tens of thousands of dollars over the past several years in proceeds from cash seized as a result of their tips. However, the vast majority of those airport seizures aren’t accompanied by criminal prosecutions. This has led to years of complaints from civil liberties groups that the DEA is abusing civil asset forfeiture—a practice that allows police to seize cash and other property suspected of being connected to criminal activity such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never arrested or charged with a crime.”

  • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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    9 hours ago

    It actually works very well in those kinds of situations. People like that are constantly getting booted from the banking system and financial services. So crypto is a very good fit for that. Some of the very first people to use Bitcoin back in like 2010 and 2011 was WikiLeaks. After they were cut off from the Visa network, they were cut off from PayPal and other money transfer businesses and they were cut off from their bank accounts and they would have shut down had it not been for the funding they got through Bitcoin. There are a few industries that are perfectly legal that are just morally dubious to some people and therefore get kicked out of the banking system quite easily. Take a look at Operation Choke Point and Operation Choke Point 2.0.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      I’m sure this will all be very convincing to get your average people to replace their existing bank account with that

      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        You could take a look at the bank bail-ins in Cyprus in like 2013, where anybody with over $100,000 worth of assets had all their money taken from them by this Cyprus government in order to stabilize the banks. How would you feel if the equivalent of your 401k that you were relying on for retirement was just taken away to stabilize a failing bank? Sure, because your money helped stabilize the bank, you get stock in the bank. But who on earth would want stock in a just failed bank?

        • spongebue@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          I’m sure this will all be equally convincing to get your average people to replace their existing bank account with that

          • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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            1 hour ago

            Yeah, most people aren’t going to figure it out until they’ve been really hurt, and then they’ll be looking for something else. Pain is the only thing that makes habits change quickly. Otherwise, they either will not change or will only change extremely slowly.