Endlessly grateful to the ‘Adopting #Bitcoin ’ event in #Arnhem for the opportunity to have an open dialogue with regulators, legislators, advocates and bitcoiners. Key messages from our discussion on AML/CFT regulation, which I recommend you watch:

Rebecca van #Essen, #FIU #Netherlands: ‘We monitor bank transactions to investigate crimes. The police don't have a lot of resources to investigate crimes.’

Me: ‘It is unnecessary and extremely dangerous to delegate police functions to financial institutions. It is a violation of basic human rights with no right of appeal and implementing the standards of authoritarian countries like #China. The police and intelligence services of democratic countries have more than enough tools to solve crimes: tracking through surveillance cameras in all public places, access to the data of internet and mobile phone providers, access to the reservation databases of hotels, any real estate, all vehicles, including rented ones, and so on.

The presumption of innocence applies until proven otherwise. Preventive mass surveillance leads to abuses of power.’

Dorien #Rookmaker, Member of the European Parliament: ‘As a former head of compliance in a bank, I can say that there are no mechanisms to protect against the abuse of compliance data through bank employees. Even during my time at the bank, we fired people for snooping, for using data of their neighbours. Financial data protection remains a key issue.’