[bastawhiz]

> Crypto-as-money is still young. We have a lot to do. Do you remember Napster? Tether is kinda like Napster – it's taking off, people love it, it's a little sketchy, and it's probably not the design that will last. We don't want to make the equivalent of Kazaa – another blip in the history that ultimately doesn't ultimately work out. The challenge is to build a platform that's as robust as BitTorrent and as great to use as Spotify and Netflix.

For something on an about page, this copy draws some extremely frank comparisons.

> If users all have to go through a KYC process, this significantly limits the viability of the token to permit free movement of money across borders.

KYC processes are, essentially, the law. Governments go out of their way to do this to cut down on financial crime. Regardless of whether you believe these laws are useful or just, I find it difficult to believe they'll have any success trying to work around these laws. Governments (in general) do not like it when folks try to create loopholes: I wouldn't bet on a project whose stated goal was to avoid complying with the law.

[CryptoPunk]

>>KYC processes are, essentially, the law

They do not apply to all financial interactions. Fortunately they have not yet passed KYC laws that apply to many types of peer-to-peer financial activity, as the ones in force were designed for an era where electronic transactions were only intermediated by large trusted third parties, and largely exempt direct p2p transactions.

So this sudden opportunity to legally engage in financial interactions without the encumberance of 40 years of accumulated AML/KYC laws that has arrived with the emergence of decentralized finance offers the opportunity to reverse the trend toward governments, at the behest of international organizations like the FATF, increasingly resorting to the warrantless dragnet surveillance of finance approach to combating crime, i.e. Total Information Awareness applied to private financial interactions.

Similar to how the internet forced governments to back off on censorship laws, cryptocurrency has the potential to force the political class to rethink current financial crime laws and liberalize people's access to money. It has the potential to lead to criminal laws being limited to those that respect traditional due process and privacy rights, and the principles of freedom of association and presumption of innocence that free societies depend on.

[notahacker]

> Similar to how the internet forced governments to back off on censorship laws, cryptocurrency has the potential to force the political class to rethink current financial crime laws and liberalize people's access to money.

Or it has the potential to force the political class to rethink current financial crime laws, and tighten up P2P loopholes cryptoenthusiasts are exploiting to make their product more attractive to ransomware developers, to the detriment of everyone else who just wants to avoid photocopying their passport every time they send money to their friends. I wonder which is more likely.

[CryptoPunk]

The internet also created new classes of crime. It doesn't mean we're worse off for liberalizing access to telecommunicatiom.

As for which I think is more likely, I think it's liberalization of finance and the retreat of the surveillance state. The new DeFi system is so much more efficient than the traditional financial system and the restrictions it's straddled with, that economic value will flow to it, and economic interests will trump the institutional inertia of the up-to-now steadily advancing surveillance state.

And it's fortunate too. If not for the sudden splash of financial liberalization brought about by cryptocurrency, the frog in the pot would have slowly been boiled by the creeping centralization of finance that has occurred over the last 40 years.

The last 40 years has seen regulatory institutions increase the restrictions they impose, the staff they employ, and the budgets they oversee, while becoming increasingly intertwined with the corporate giants they are meant to regulate through campaign contributions, political lobbying and the revolving door that exists between them and the private sector.

[bastawhiz]

> Similar to how the internet forced governments to back off on censorship laws, cryptocurrency has the potential to force the political class to rethink current financial crime laws and liberalize people's access to money.

To do this the currency needs to win in a battle against every government without being blocked or made illegal. It doesn't matter what you think about KYC laws: trying to subvert them means taking on governments, and that is almost never a winning strategy. Especially when your strategy is "build a technical system that outfoxes the government by strong-arming them into my way of thinking".

[riffraff]

> how the internet forced governments to back off on censorship laws

Did they? Governments regularly censor stuff on the internet all over the world.

[CryptoPunk]

One example is that obscenity laws stopped being enforced in some states as authorities gave up on trying to stop internet pornography.

That's maybe not the best example for making a pro-liberalization case, as pornography isn't exactly a public good, but it's what comes to mind as a clear case of the legal strategy employed by the state changing due to new technology.

[bouncycastle]

KYC laws essentially treat everyone like a criminal or a terrorist. They turn our financial institutions into surveillance centers. They are also ineffective, see https://www.regulationasia.com/aml-controls-are-ineffective-....

Meanwhile, the real criminals pass through KYC with stolen ID.

[ddon]

totally agree.. once my account on Revolut was blocked, without explaining why, and was kept locked for 6-7 months. during these months they asked all sorts of documents, and then they closed the account and the rest of the money which was on that account were sent to some strangers :) and again, without any explanations. now, copies of my documents are sitting somewhere on their servers waiting to be hacked and distributed to criminals, who will use them to pass through KYC :)

[malux85]

I had a similar experience as a false positive for fraud, it was enormously frustrating and time consuming to clear my name, often having to be very adversarial and threaten legal action to the companies, before they finally cleared me for what turned out to be a mistake on their end.

[bouncycastle]

Yeah, getting your details hacked is the scariest part. With these documents, criminals can breeze through any other KYC in an instant, pretending to be you.

Another thing with KYC is they are above all privacy laws, including GDPR. For example, services are not allowed to delete your private account details even if you close your account, for 5 years or more. Also, as an account holder, you are not allowed to know who your KYC details were shared with the government / law enforcement, and why. You are not even allowed to view the warrant (should there be one).

[mola]

Don't you know the SV aristocracy are above the law? We can debate the law, we should, not following a law is also a choice. But disrupting laws as an ideology is eroding our ability to engage in meaningful social exchanges. The pipe dream that technology can absolve humanity from unavoidable need for trust and faith is perhaps improving our material situation in the short term. But human psychology is not easily augmented by technology. Deep down, to face the uncertainties and the inevitable lack of full knowledge of reality, we strive for the safety of faith and trust.

Trying to eliminate it will push a massive amount of humans to reactionary action.

And when humans can't get safety out of trust, they get it using force and control.

The art is to balance these, not to imagine you can eliminate it.

BTW: I'm far from being religious. My idea of faith is more abstract than the religious one.

[pjc50]

It's worse than that: every reservoir of trust represents a resource that fraudsters can profit from destroying, like a rainforest. It's an opportunity to make money for themselves while gradually wearing down the rest of society and making it worse for everyone else. Just as the deliberate destruction of trust in politics leads to people storming the Capitol.