> In criminal law people aren't expected to prove what they did wasn't illegal, it is the other way around.

I very much understand that, but you missed my point with that constraint: the point was that if your objection is that legal underlying activity can constitute money laundering, then to prove your objection you need to show an example of provably legal underlying activity.

On the other hand, if your complaint is that innocent-before-proven-guilty isn't being upheld by courts, that's a fine complaint, but an entirely separate one from money laundering.

> What did happen in the case of CZs conviction is the state alleged that lack of KYC allows some actors with illegal funds to pass through, making weak KYC checks an element of money laundering.

In other words he did conceal illegal activity. Hence my point.

Every single bank and person conceals illegal activity by your final sentence. You probably have sold something for cash bought by a drug dealer and unknowingly laundered drug money.

The point here is that an unwitting actor is somehow guilty if they did not do KYC. By your standard basically every gas station near the border is a money launderer, since they know damn well much of the cash they take and transmit is drug and cartel money.

And that's the genius of this line of reasoning. There is nary a dollar in circulation that hasnt been used in crime.

Again, you're mixing things up and moving goalposts. I wasn't trying to make a case for what money laundering is, only what (as I understand it) it definitely isn't. The example you cite clearly covered up underlying criminal activity, whereas the claim was that you can be guilty of money laundering without any illegal underlying crime. Hence it fails to support the premise. That is all.