Many people assume banks and the traditional systems involving fiat currency are much cleaner than crypto currencies like Steem. I disagree, in my opinion, it is more likely that criminals will hide inside the autonomous protections fiat currency has. With Steem for example, scammers or plagiarism typically end up with a bad reputation and posts being hidden. Ponzi pushers, drug dealers, and organized criminals who need clean large amounts of bills will use the legacy banking system over crypto-currency.
Laundering money inside Steem's ecosystem is currently laborious and easy to spot because of the size of the market cap and limited number of places to trade in large amounts. Some today still believe crypto-currency is completely anonymous. Mainstream media will also have you believe that. But in reality it's incredibly easy to track someone anywhere they go, especially if they are under investigation.
In a few cases I witnessed scammers sent their profits to an exchange. A government who subpoenas the information , can have these details uncovered through a digital paper trail. Working together to keep bad actors to a minimum will only make things better for us in the long run. As the more self-policing the community does the better off everyone is as far as freedom goes trading and interacting in a peer-to-peer way..
Banfield is cutting ties the Steem community claiming the main reason to be flagging. He faults Steemcleaners for one instance that hit upon a false positive. My perspective is different. Steemcleaners has a respectful and honest team. I urge people to go chat with them. Overall I believe steemcleaners is fairly accurate. They have also put in place measures to mitigate flags or remove them if done by mistake. Is the system perfect? No system is. But it is still working well every day to prevent scammers and plagiarism from taking hold in our network.
Even if I disagree with a some of it. I understand they want to protect people's hard work and those who would not have otherwise had a voice. All the information put into the chain is always going to be freely accessible. I can understand if an artist wants to receive compensation for their work and be paid. On the other hand, living in today's age, it simply isn't as easy as it used to be to keep paid-only content from being shared for free. Causing a bit of a conundrum.
Dankske Bank's problems are just another case that shows the traditional banking system is often bought by wealthy criminals. I have confidence in Steem's Witness team. Blockchain enables anyone to look and see for them self any users action on the network all the way back until the first day the user joined.
Cooperation shows transparency. It also shows strength. The fact witnesses, developers, and investors are all willing to work together is a huge plus. This is another reason criminals will probably want to shy away from the network. As it only makes a criminals job much harder when a transparent as well as unchangeable ledger is kept for the entire life of the Steem network by the gatekeepers.