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by bee_rider 378 days ago
It is unsurprising that Venmo has a log of transactions, right? That’s a necessary part of the job. Having it as something that can be presented as a social feed is the weird thing…

It almost seems like a radical art project, philosophical statement, or social experiment around transparency. Like, hypothetically in some alternate universe if they did no KYC, and just published everybody’s transactions, your peers could inspect your transactions, the police could just look and see if you were transacting with criminals… sort of like open source transactions. Maybe that was the original idea? And then eventually they got some actual customers and said “shit we’re a real company now, let’s put the social experiment on the back burner, add an opt-out, and start doing in-house kyc.”