The justifications for why the pardon is okay are ridiculously flimsy and I assumed that it was because they weren't really trying, but bewilderingly it does actually appear to have convinced some credulous people on Hacker News, so I suppose enough consent was manufactured that people think going out of your way to let money launderers use your platform is not a big deal? Maybe it's because people don't understand that typically the reason people launder money is because they committed major crimes to get that money and have no way to actually use it without getting caught.

For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)