People who have worked in financial services (as an agency on behalf of businesses) know that KYC is largely a mitigation of legal liability thing - avoiding entanglement with criminal activities, or possibly illicit acts, or trade transactions that could get the business prosecuted as illegal.
It exists in the form that it does because no business wants the publicity of “Joe Bloggs made his bomb using tractor parts from Random Company Ltd, which is now under investigation for having supplied the parts”, or because no business wants to have to explain to a government official who asks “You sold your product to a country on our Unfriendly Countries list, and you gave them a product that we have a trade ban on providing - why did you break the law?”. Those are at least parts of it.
The stereotypical example often used in financial training videos takes the form of an alleged clothing shop that is secretly a meth lab - where the financial representatives get held liable for not having done sufficient background checks.
While UYK sounds like a good idea, the Powers That Be aren’t exactly going to be on-board with it for the reasons mentioned. Some KYC serves some utility, even if it is disproportionately to some people’s advantage and against others. I am also concerned about the elimination of all anonymising technologies - things like Monero - that threaten to make all private transactions impossible; and I’m also concerned that all of this talk of “transparency” is asymmetrical and one-way. I fear as a planet we have lost both the value of discretion for everyday people, as well as the value of transparency for elites to hold them to a higher standard.
People who have worked in financial services (as an agency on behalf of businesses) know that KYC is largely a mitigation of legal liability thing - avoiding entanglement with criminal activities, or possibly illicit acts, or trade transactions that could get the business prosecuted as illegal.
It exists in the form that it does because no business wants the publicity of “Joe Bloggs made his bomb using tractor parts from Random Company Ltd, which is now under investigation for having supplied the parts”, or because no business wants to have to explain to a government official who asks “You sold your product to a country on our Unfriendly Countries list, and you gave them a product that we have a trade ban on providing - why did you break the law?”. Those are at least parts of it.
The stereotypical example often used in financial training videos takes the form of an alleged clothing shop that is secretly a meth lab - where the financial representatives get held liable for not having done sufficient background checks.
While UYK sounds like a good idea, the Powers That Be aren’t exactly going to be on-board with it for the reasons mentioned. Some KYC serves some utility, even if it is disproportionately to some people’s advantage and against others. I am also concerned about the elimination of all anonymising technologies - things like Monero - that threaten to make all private transactions impossible; and I’m also concerned that all of this talk of “transparency” is asymmetrical and one-way. I fear as a planet we have lost both the value of discretion for everyday people, as well as the value of transparency for elites to hold them to a higher standard.