> This is exactly the behavior that “never happens from a legitimate business” except when it does by the tens of billions of dollars.

> As Bits about Money has frequently observed, people who write professionally about money—including professional advocates for financially vulnerable populations—often misunderstand alternative financial services, largely because those services are designed to serve a social class that professionals themselves do not belong to, rarely interact with directly, and do not habitually ask how they pay rent, utilities, or phone bills.

This resonated for me, and reminded me of the way I and my formally-banked and formally-employed colleagues sometimes struggle to wrap our minds around payday lending (sure looks like usury from the security and comfort of a formal banking relationship!), remittances, hawala, pawn shops, Cash App, gift card exchanges, video game economies… for all the normative thinking in the professional classes, people sure do develop a kaleidoscopic array of approaches to storing and transmitting value.

“Just sanction [whoever]” or “just debank [whoever]” sounds to certain circles like an appealing tool to have—the modern equivalent of exile—but I have to imagine it’s probably healthy that such a tactic is hard for a state actor to apply in a totally watertight kind of way.

It's clear, from watching Russia fail to be completely sanctioned that this is not watertight. The question I have is: have these sanctions added a money laundering tax to doing business? How much? What is the cost of enforcing the sanctions vs the added cost and is that worth it?

I don't know if this has been explored, bit I think it's an interesting follow on to "all or nothing" watertight sanctions.

Rarely does it look like a clear "debank X" system; it's more like "you look suspiciously like someone who might use our systems in a crime, in a way that will cost us money and get in trouble with the law, so we're not going to touch you". Which is much harder for an innocent person to deal with.

I do think there ought to be some sort of fallback banking and account denial review process, if we're going to make it that critical to society.

> struggle to wrap our minds around [..] remittances

You have family you care about back in your home country, so you send them money from your better-paid foreign job - what's confusing about that?