Item — HN Reader

> With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game.

This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the back, small blockers.)

My first experience with crypto was buying $5 in bitcoin from a friend. If I didn't do it that way I could go on a number of websites and buy crypto without opening an account, via credit card, or via SMS. Today, most of the $5 would be eaten by fees, and buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.

2 comments

> buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.

Hello my friend, grab a seat so we can contemplate the wickedness of man. KYC is not some authoritarian or entrenched industry response to fintech upstarts, it's a necessary thing that protects billions of people from crime and corruption.

That's an unreasonably charitable reading of the purpose of KYC. It's primarily about government control of the primary medium of economic exchange. As always, this benefits the privileged at the expense of the less privileged.

Its use to limit competition from cryptocurrency is a perfect example of that. A major market which crypto was supposed to be able to serve - the "unbanked" - are largely locked out of it. Turns out giving poor people access to money is not a feature that the system wants to allow.

The benefit you claim for KYC is a marketing bullet point side effect at best.

It doesn't really matter what use cases cryptocurrencies were supposed to have — their actual use cases turned out to be scams and speculation. We can wax philosophic about the failed promise, but to a rounding error scams and speculation have always been their only use cases.

Which makes it very understandable that crypto companies became subject to KYC laws as they tried to scale up to serve the American public! Online gambling and securities trading are already subject to KYC. The rest of the activity is the scams and crime that (despite your cynical reading) KYC was intended to fight in the first place.

If I understand the discussion correctly:

Your opinion is that the benefits of KYC (safety) outweigh the downsides of KYC (giving up liberty).

The other poster's opinion is that the downsides outweigh the benefits.

There is a quote out there regarding those who would sacrifice liberty to obtain safety, but it slips my mind at the moment.

Careening at 90 miles per hour through a school zone crosswalk as kids dive out of the way: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Yawn. If that were truly analogous to the current topic, rather than a gross exaggeration, the analogy would be unnecessary.

Replace "Careening at 90 miles per hour through a school zone crosswalk as kids dive out of the way" with the actual topic of "Spending your money on legal things without government tracking and control".

Your point is understood that you personally prefer one thing to another, compared to another person preferring the opposite.

And if you were truly able to attack my position on its merits you wouldn't need to keep stripping out all specifics to build a straw man, but here we are!

(Also, the analogy would only be necessary if it were… not analogous to the topic at hand? That makes no sense.)

> It doesn't really matter what use cases cryptocurrencies were supposed to have — their actual use cases turned out to be scams and speculation.

I'm going to translate what you said here out of your obscene level of privilege:

"It doesn't really matter what use cases cryptocurrencies were supposed to have - even if their actual use cases did address those concerns, not all of them did, and what's more important to me, and other hypercapitalists like myself, is to maintain my privilege."

I very much did not say that cryptocurrencies' actual use cases address those concerns. In fact, I said the opposite!

Like the other commenter, the reason you need to "translate" my argument is that you can't rebut what I'm actually saying on its merits.

It turns out, it is actually you "translating" views. Here you are "translating" and "stripping out all specifics to build a straw man", as you put it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571293

Is that because, as you adroitly put it, you couldn't respond to the actual views on their merits?

Is there a reason you can't be civilized and simply say "I personally believe that government tracking and control of individual spending on legal stuff is okay if [insert your preferred benefits here] are realized, but I respect those who don't agree with me on that"? Here, let me lead by example:

I personally believe that crimes which harm others are bad, but not enough to justify government tracking and control of individual spending on legal things. I also respect people who feel differently (including you), because their opinions here are no more or less valid than mine.

Now you try?

> As always, this benefits the privileged at the expense of the less privileged.

This is all quite a naive look at the world. The least privileged don't have any money, so by definition aren't hurt by KYC.

Capital is power and power makes the world go round. If the powerful of the world desire one thing above all else, it's not to have any scrutiny over how they acquire more power and make use of it, with financial privacy being a very large part of that.

Financial privacy is without doubt important for the regular citizens, and we should have laws in place that protect it. There is no reason for the government to have access to your transactions outside a well-functioning system of checks and balances, court orders and warrants etc.

But financial privacy maximalists strike me as useful idiots for unrestrained power. There is nothing good that society has to gain from allowing anonymous transfers of billions of dollars across borders. Once you tolerate anonymous finance, an entire bestiary of crimes and abuses become possible or easier, without any benefit for the common man. This was widely the case in the second half of the 20th century, and the financial industry had no problem laundering the profits made from the misery and death of the wretched of the earth, as long as they got their cut.

KYC is foremost a tool for democracy and checks on power. It's not the only tool and it can't operate by itself, but you need it in place before you can even ask the question "what are the reasonable and socially useful limits of financial privacy?"

> The least privileged don't have any money, so by definition aren't hurt by KYC.

A very privileged perspective.

What about, for example, undocumented immigrants? Countries allow them in to exploit for cheap labor, so they do have some money. But using banks is difficult and risky because of their documentation situation.

Now, if you're a certain kind of conservative, you'll say that's the way it's supposed to be, because these people having committed a civil violation are "criminals" which the KYC laws are attempting to punish.

But that's not how a compassionate human thinks.

> undocumented immigrants? Countries allow them in to exploit for cheap labor

It seems you've answered your own question.

Your argument seems constructed as a red hering, "what about <this group of people left in legal limbo by the politicians>, wouldn't they benefit from <the speculative financial scheme I have a stake in, that the state can't track or ban>?". The solution to that problem is, you know, to not have people put into a situation where they are exploited and do not have legal rights; and in general, the solution to human rights failures in democracies surely isn't the suspension of laws, it's better laws and better systems put in place to protect those legal rights.

In the great scheme of things, undocumented migrants in 1st world economies are far from the wretched of the earth I was referring to. For example, it has recently emerged that a fellow country man of mine was involved in supplying european mercenaries into the DR Congo, which were caught in the rebel capture of Goma early 2025. The ring leader was found to have laundered a few millions of euros through cryptocurrency he earned from Congo.

DRC is one of the poorest countries on earth, with the majority of its population without electricity, internet, smartphones etc. They are the real "unbanked" and what bitcoin has done for them is to enable war. Now, it's very likely that the war would have been exactly the same if the mercs were paid using the traditional financial system, but at least that would leave traces and discouraged some of the mercs, since it's an illegal profession in many european countries of origin.

I don't have a solution for all the world's troubles, but this dystopia where you can anonymously buy armed soldiers on the internet to prop up your authoritarian regime or guerilla faction, surely isn't the best of all possible worlds.

Undocumented immigrants can absolutely open bank accounts: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/undocumented-immi...

So was the telescreen.

There are Ethereum, Algorand, many alternatives with low fees.