Comment by lolinder
1 year ago
You should really read patio11's article on KYC [0]. A relevant paragraph:
> Many people believe that the law requires a bank to see your government-issued ID in person to open a bank account. Again, this is incorrect; the law very rarely requires any particular action. The most prescriptive the US gets is that the sort of KYC information required about a customer include their true identity, including a name (not, incidentally, their “true” name because governments actually have some glimmer of understanding that that is not a thing which exists), a residential address, their date of birth, and an identifying number.
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...
Looks like his argument is that randomized and client to client based rules are better. To some extent I agree.
However, it's inconsistent and we have a government that is punitive, which is why I see that these KYC approaches are reactive to that. There's not punitive measures for violating privacy concerns and storing/profiting from this data.
In practice, to buy crypto, you have to give a disreputable private entity (crypto exchanges have a terrible history of not being scummy.. is cryptobase good? only time will tell) very sensitive documents.