Princess Leia, before your execution, you will join me at a ceremony that will make this battle station operational. No star system will dare oppose the Emperor now.
Princess Leia:
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Every government and central bank in the world is tightening their grip around the tiniest transactions of their citizenry. In the meantime, they are printing Trillions and shovelling it to their sycophantic corporate and political elite buddies.
And then, they wonder why people are being driven to use Cryptocurrency...
For those of you who are offended by this characterization; how does burdening 8 billion law-abiding Citizens with impossibly complex and arduous KYC/AML requirements make sense -- when just one FTX incident exceeds the value of all legitimate remittance transactions on the planet for the entire year, and KYC/AML doesn't affect the likes of FTX, Tether, etc. in the least?
Perhaps you feel like you're "doing something". You are -- making every law-abiding free Citizen feel like a criminal and expend countless hours of life-energy, to do precisely nothing to solve the problem, while crippling the legitimate small business and personal enterprise of the entire planet.
I think it's appropriate you open with Star Wars, as this is mainly fantasy.
> burdening 8 billion law-abiding Citizens with impossibly complex and arduous KYC/AML requirements
Not sure if you read the article, but they just aren't a significant burden for most people. They could be better, sure.
And I think the "driven to use Cryptocurrency" example does not pair at all well with FTX. The massive wave of cryptocurrency failures from Mt Gox to FTX demonstrate beautifully why an unregulated financial system is a terrible idea.
No, you aren’t burdened. The bulk of humanity is, though.
The compliance costs in terms of effort/time/money expended per dollar of revenue affected is probably 10x to 100x for them, as it is for you. This has been my experience, and my observation across many life stories. I taught basic finance to hundreds of mid- to low-income families in the 2000’s.
So again - a “let them eat cake” admonishion.
And FTX was just a massive, traditional fraud. Literally nothing to do with Cryptocurrency, other than as the medium of the fraud.
Random charlatans stealing money from gullible and trusting marks.
The bulk of the legitimate cryptocurrency platforms continue working. A few that were obvious mathematical impossibilities implode - much like fraudulent businesses have for ages past.
> No, you aren’t burdened. The bulk of humanity is, though.
I look forward to somebody demonstrating that. The author of the article, a domain expert, thinks otherwise.
> And FTX was just a massive, traditional fraud. Literally nothing to do with Cryptocurrency, other than as the medium of the fraud.
Other than the medium, the culture, the community, the domain, and the regulatory vacuum of cryptocurrency. So a great deal to do with it. And it's not as if it's an outlier for the space.
If it's really the burden you are concerned about, you might look again at cryptocurrency. The burden just to use it is relatively high. Then there are the higher caveat emptor burdens. And then we get to the vast, vast sums lost through volatility, exchange costs, user error, incompetence, fraud, and theft. Being upset about KYC/AML and not about that is a situation of motes and beams.
Well, there was that entire huge NFT crypto scam bubble.
To a first and probably second approximation, crypto is only good for getting scammed and scamming others. There's a lot of overly credulous people in the field, which just attracts crime like a moth to a flame.
It can't be proof of ownership if it's all of those things because ownership is decided by eg judges and not what's written in a random database somewhere.
As we've seen with the reactions of prominent crypto figures who've gotten robbed, approximately nobody really believes that the ledger is the final determiner of ownership. They don't say, "Well, other people own that money now," and move on. They tend get mad and call the cops, just like everybody else.
And as we're seeing in the great raft of crypto-related bankruptcies, judges don't take it seriously either. Just because somebody happens to hold the keys for tokens means very little to them. Something that appears quite palatable to the people who might get some of their investment back.
So in practice, it looks like digital ledgers are more of a "fantasy football" version of ownership tracking: taken very seriously by people who play the game while they're playing it, but not by anybody else, and also not when the game's over.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Are there possibly some uses of crypto that are a) value creating, b) socially positive, and c) not more easily/cheaply solved with other technologies? Sure. But it's got to be a small fraction of total money put in.
From MtGox to FTX it's been more than a decade of incompetence and fraud. I'm sure there are sincere people who were just excited about the technology who are devastated that the grifters and criminals rushed in to take advantage of their regulatory vacuum. But if they are truly sincere, they can't deny the massive problems in the space.
> And then, they wonder why people are being driven to use Cryptocurrency...
If only. Normal people are only buying crypto to speculate. They drive the price up to absurd levels and then write it all off as a scam when it corrects. Meanwhile good technology like Monero remains marginalized instead of replacing the USD as it should.
You seem to be speaking for ... a lot of people you can't possibly know -- such as me, and every person I work with and deal with on a day to day basis in the Crypto R&D field.
As for Monero -- don't complain, let's bring it mainstream by building something. Specifically: something that state-level interference can't stop, even if they're quivering in rage that it exists!
That's what us "speculators" who code every day on large-scale Cryptocurrency decentralized systems are doing...
> such as me, and every person I work with and deal with on a day to day basis in the Crypto R&D field.
You ended up proving my point. Normal people don't research or develop cryptocurrency technology, they buy and sell it on Binance. It's hard enough for people to understand BTC, the altcoin situation is next to hopeless.
> As for Monero -- don't complain, let's bring it mainstream by building something.
I've gotten paid anonymously in XMR for a small programming task. It was a wonderful experience, I wish everybody would pay me that way. The technology already already works. If anything still needs to be built, it's even stronger privacy guarantees against the perpetual government encroachment.
This is a social problem. How do we get people to drop USD and start using XMR instead? It's a form of the ages old circular logic problem of bootstrapping: nobody uses it to buy things because nobody accepts it, and nobody accepts it because nobody uses it to buy things.
Always kind of wondered why monero onlyfans or state weed hasn't happened much. Work that is legal, but the financial system makes an absolute bitch to actually financially transact for.
I'm wondering to this day. Prudish financial institutions refusing business to "questionable" businesses are one of the problems cryptocurrencies were intended to solve.
But when I suggested that here I got called out for it. No idea why there was so much hostility.
I wonder what else you don't fancy. I mean, your argument is essentially the financial version of the "terrorists and child molesters" argument. Do you also support mandated cryptography backdoors because cryptography also protects criminals?
All this mandatory financial reporting for "anti-money laundering" purposes or whatever is just the financial arm of the global panopticon. You're defending total global surveillance and control. You're advocating giving up freedom for security.
> burdening 8 billion law-abiding Citizens with impossibly complex and arduous KYC/AML requirements
TFA notes that "This will affect the typical user of the financial system precisely zero times during their lives." It is very much not a complex and arduous situation in most instances, only in very few edge cases. (Which patio11 wants us to pay closer attention to.) I had occasion to unexpectedly transfer $10k over ACH recently, and, while a few minutes on the phone with my bank confirming things was slightly annoying, I would describe it as neither complex nor arduous. I am confident that it did not trigger a CTR or SAR, given it was not a cash transaction, and I was happy to answer a few questions.
This is just factually untrue. AML policies unjustly affect millions of Americans.
At US Bank, you can’t deposit cash without an ID which is standard post 2018 or so. Yet go to a US Bank in a low income area, deposit $100 in a family member’s account and they will ask for ID, social security number and your job.
US Bank has been involved in multiple money laundering scandals leading to deferred criminal prosecution.
Many friends have times where they can’t withdraw their own cash, have had accounts closed, have been falsely reported for fraud without any recourse etc etc.
Also because financial fraud and identity theft is rarely prosecuted, regular Americans are bombarded with friction and hassle to transact.
People outside normal banking use Chime or prepaid bank cards, which promptly get banned from being used in a wide variety of businesses.
AML policies and the Bank Secrecy Act is a violation of the 4th Amendment. The BSA (a misnomer) has expanded in scope since the 70s and as money has inflated. It’s went from an adjusted $70,000+ to $600 today (or $85 in 1970s dollars).
And it seems the Supreme Court is going to act on the BSA sometime in the next year. It is a crime against the individual, a violation of civil rights and indefensible.
It is purely motivated by tax enforcement and controlling the population. It does not prevent or identify crime. There is an estimated trillion+ of trade based money laundering every year.
I'm always gobsmacked at the level of ... jawdropping "Let them eat cake!" self-delusion displayed by some wealthy people.
"This hasn't affected me, so it mustn't affect anyone!"
The grinding day-to-day slogging, through the mud of irrelevant and useless regulatory burden experienced by the "lesser" classes of civilization (and anyone actually trying to run a small business) is just astonishing.
Basically, many people just "stop". They can't navigate it, and know they'll never defeat it. So they just cease to try.
I thought their response was sarcasm. Surely no one would seriously think it is reasonable to be questioned over the phone over $10k which is what, enough to cover a month of expenses for an upper middle class family in Manhattan or San Francisco?
As for a SAR, lmao. It's illegal for them to tell you if you triggered it, how on earth would you know?
> This is just factually untrue. AML policies unjustly affect millions of Americans.
If it's that clearly untrue, presumably you can document this?
And I'll note that even if you can, it doesn't necessarily contradict what you're replying to, which was, "This will affect the typical user of the financial system precisely zero times during their lives."
With 330 million residents, millions of people could have KYC/AML problems and patio11 still could be right. I've never had a problem like that, and have only heard one person ever mention it. And he was an Australian trying to open a US bank account to get around certain Australian import taxes, so I suspect he was somebody who should have been having problems.
While I appreciate the problems that you're describing, I'm dubious that it violates the 4th amendment. In particular look at the Private Search Exemption. Which says that the 4th amendment does NOT apply to searches done by private parties. And if a private party has voluntarily done the search and reported it to the government, the government may redo the search without a warrant, but can't exceed what the private party said.
This applies here because both KYC and AML procedures are set up and carried out by private banks. Which makes it a private search, that fits squarely in the exemption.
In turn this begs the question of whether the government can encourage through intentionally vague regulation behavior that they cannot directly ask for. But given the courts we have, I suspect they will avoid answering this question.
Furthermore it is hardly the worst violation of the 4th that is common. I'm personally most incensed about civil forfeiture. Through the workaround of suing your stuff instead of you, all Constitutional protections are voided. The result is essentially legalized robbery by the government, carried out by the very law enforcement departments that directly profit from the proceeds. Given that the courts have repeatedly OKed this, why would you expect them to object to KYC and AML?
It's not really a private or voluntary search when it's imposed by government. Otherwise I could just make a law saying everybody who walks down X private road has to get searched by private security or turn around, obviously that won't work. The private road owner might never wanted to do it, they're only doing because the gun of the government man is at their head.
It is a public search carried with the dirty work portion of the search done by private entities directed by the state.
But the government DIDN'T impose it. Whatever the bank's procedures may be, the regulator can say with a straight face, "We didn't tell them to implement those procedures, and we didn't tell them to take those actions. That was their decision."
And, unbelievable as it may seem, the government won't be exactly wrong either.
I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that the KYC laws as written don't impose the requirement to search
papers to verify proof of identity, address, etc.
Sure cute games can be made about the semantics of it, but that's why we have human beings as judges. It's blatantly obvious that when you threaten to toss someone in a cage for not doing something that you are imposing that on them, it's not voluntary and you are doing it on behalf of the imposer. If a human being judge truly can't recognize that then the whole system is broken and we need to start over.
Actually the laws as written DON'T impose any such requirement. Banks generally choose to implement policies that do that, but it is not required. And during COVID, many banks changed those policies.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th... goes into this. The primary concern for regulators is that you must have made statements to the bank that you can later be put in jail for lying about. And the bank must have approved procedures in place for identifying when transactions are high enough risk to decide to take verification steps.
On your comments about judges, you apparently have substantially more confidence in the common sense applied by the legal system than I do. Don't forget we now have a Supreme Court judge (Amy Barrett) who is on record, in a legal paper no less, saying that fiat money and the Fed are obviously unconstitutional, and judges should handle that by simply avoiding ever considering the question. (Read https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1304/ if you think I'm making that up.)
The letter of the law not explicitly saying "search their ID paperwork" does not mean it's not an imposition created by government. The "written" text seldom is a good indication of what is actually imposed. For instance, for a period of time a shoe lace was considered a machine gun [0]. You would never realize it unless you looked at the documented directives/interpretation of regulators.
If the practical imposition placed on you by regulators is that you in practice are needing to search paperwork to satisfy KYC, that's a government imposed requirement no matter what the actual law says.
In copyright law and free speech analysis something even stronger happens where the rules are sometimes extremely unclear with no real way to get clarity but some random punishment has been imposed that causes everyone to read tea leaves constantly and self-censor themselves; this is called a "chilling effect" and is absolutely taken into consideration when analyzing a challenge to the constitutionality of a law or regulatory structure.
I agree with your broader point but I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court case is about a technicality involving foreign bank account reporting, basically whether a failure to file that you had 5 foreign bank accounts is 5 counts or 1 count of FBAR violations. Unless there’s another pending case I haven’t heard of?
Funniest AML thing I ever did. Went to open a new account in the app, it's like sorry you haven't verified your identity can't do it through the app. Okay. Walk into a branch, ask to make a new account. They're like nah, you need to come back with proof of where you live before we can verify your identity. I'm literally standing in front of you. With ID. I already have 3 accounts, what's a 4th?
And then, they wonder why people are being driven to use Cryptocurrency...
For those of you who are offended by this characterization; how does burdening 8 billion law-abiding Citizens with impossibly complex and arduous KYC/AML requirements make sense -- when just one FTX incident exceeds the value of all legitimate remittance transactions on the planet for the entire year, and KYC/AML doesn't affect the likes of FTX, Tether, etc. in the least?
Perhaps you feel like you're "doing something". You are -- making every law-abiding free Citizen feel like a criminal and expend countless hours of life-energy, to do precisely nothing to solve the problem, while crippling the legitimate small business and personal enterprise of the entire planet.
Congratulations!