The double standard makes perfect sense when you consider that the entire foundations of our fiat economy are dependent on the the success of banks.  Hence the phrase "too big to fail; too big to jail".  They can make an example of Ross Ulbricht because the US economy won't collapse as a result.  If the US locked up every banker that did something wrong and fined banks amounts that were more proportionate to their crimes, they'd effectively be shooting themselves in the foot head.  It would be fatal if major banks went under, so they'll keep doing everything they can think of to prevent that happening.  

Eventually, though, the banks will take that one step too far, where there's no coming back from it.  They're on borrowed time.  The bill comes due.  Until that point comes, a slap on the wrist is all they're ever going to get.  

Bitcoin is clearly not the main problem, but it helps criminals to laundering money easier.Bitcoin is in fact use for people and criminals to hide money from governments for many reasons. If they had to use US$ the laundering is more difficult. Using Bitcoin the laundering is much easier because it can be value transfer between individuals, across international borders, and so forth. Using dollars is easier to track and catch criminals.

Its obvious that the main reason is because bitcoin is way easier, cheaper and also its harder to trace than using banking system. Eventhough you can tracked the transactions and the transactions are recorded, you can never now who owns it, someone can have more than 100 address to circulate and hide transactions between accounts and by the time you know which one is the right address, the amount of money inside already been transferred to somewhere else.

The idea of anonymity and untraceability are two of the main reasons why criminal organizations are attracted to cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin money laundering is still a difficult thing for me.

Unless bitcoin is truly a substitute for an existing currency, the process of money laundering will always be; The process of usdt-btc-usdt means that there is always a need to go into the banking system where money laundering is now strictly regulated, and that all bitcoin transactions on the Internet will leave a good mark. In contrast, the money laundering of artwork is more reliable, faster and more profitable than bitcoin, so even if someone is using bitcoin to launder money, it is believed to be very rare.

The fines levied on the banks are carefully calculated to ensure that they don't harm them. In effect, it is actually just another form of taxation. Think of it as the 'doing bad stuff' tax. Banks factor that into the calculation of what business they decide to do as an extra risk factor.

Money laundering using crypto is tiny in comparison and most of it has moved away from Bitcoin to more anonymous altcoins that are better suited.

I fully agree with you on this,politics always protects those who funding them before election,while they are in power and after.Banks and governments are closely related and depend on each other,just remember 2008 and how most of world governments saved the banks with public money,although the banking system was to blame for the financial crisis.

I bet many big banks do the same thing today,money is just money for them-there is no difference whether the money come from drug cartels or illegal arms dealers,it is only important that everything remains undiscovered.Even if that fails governments service will clean up for them.

At least for HSBC, there were a proof and they were caught for this illegal transactions, because everything happened within the system. But for bitcoin it won't leave any proof, just a ledger entry in blockchain. It is pseudo anonymous in nature, hence governments are actually worried that bitcoin is the much better and cheaper option for money laundering. So it's not about double standard game played by the governments. Bitcoin has now become a favorite currency for illegal transactions like money laundering and terrorism financing. We as a common people, certainly don't want such nuisance to happen in bitcoin network because it's hard to catch. 

Well bitcoin is used by money launderers to avoid the eye of the authority. But such moves are now a disadvantage to money launderers since the transactions can be easy traced using blockchain technology. That is why what they thought the anonymous transactions is also the thing that leads to their imprisonment since they never thought of the traceable transactions by looking at the blockchain records.