I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents.
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
> I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
As someone who have been living in a couple of countries under a temporal residence I can say it's not that simple. In many cases the temporal residence is simply not accepted, or not in the list of standard docs, etc. Private companies don't really care about all those non standard cases, and they ask either for a passport of the country or a permanent residence at least.
So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about
Not OP but in a similar situation. In online banks there's nowhere to upload these temporary certificates, they accept a limited number of options (passeport, residence card etc) and temporary certificate printed on an A4 paper isn't one of them. You can try sending it via email to customer support, I did it with around 8 different banks and Revolut was the only one to reply and open an account for me after the manual review. Another one was PCS that didn't even ask for residence permit but then it went bust, and it took around 6 months to get the money back.
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.
I'm in the same position as the GP. Impossible, because EU bureaucracy sometimes yield kafkaesque deadlocks. For example, some EU countries stated that their permits given to ukrainians are to be considered valid past the printed expiration date and thus stopped producing new plastic for them. Now, good luck finding any KYC provider that will accept that. Or any KYC provider that accepts printed Poland's TPS. Or any provider that doesn't chuckle on a set of documents, each of which is from a different country (like me). Etc, etc.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but I am trying to understand this situation. There are still some physical bank branches and I assume at least some banks will open an account for you with that TPS if you visit a branch. Is that not correct? That way you would have access to at least some financial services, if not those where as you write (remote) KYC is needed.
I tried with one physical bank, and they refused; the expat forums said it's the same with all, though I didn't verify myself tbh.
The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).
The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.
[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]
Ah this sucks.
If I understand correctly, in our country the expats get a separate paper confirming they are here legally which for some uses (one of them is opening a bank account) has the same validity as an ID card.
You get a stamp in the passport that you're waiting for a decision regarding your stay, but it's meaningless to anyone besides the border control people.
I assume there will never be any implementation side to focus on, if there's no legal side to push for it. Because as we can clearly see around us, the tech boys don't give a zit on your accesses and privacy and rights, so they have to be pushed to care.
>I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
You realize that "locks keep honest people honest" is a reason to have locks, right? The point is that honest people will commit tax fraud if we make it easy for them to do.
The thing is you kind of need KYC because otherwise it becomes too easy to launder money. Most countries have previously had problems with organized crime. In the US, the mafia had immense control in some cities in the early to mid 1900s. They're gone, in part, because of processes like KYC.
Many countries still have problems with organized crime, and it's getting worse even though they have aggressive KYC and AML. Israel is one example I'm familiar with. So it's a bit more complicated than that.
I understand the goal of KYC/AML, and maybe in some places it's implemented correctly. But from my limited experience in the EU, it can be easy for criminals to avoid it, but it makes my life difficult for no good reason (both for privacy violation and for times when it is simply fails).
The entire point of the expression is that many people will do things they shouldn't do if they are given an easy opportunity. The idea is that shame is ultimately what keeps most people in line. The vast majority of people won't commit armed robbery, but a few more will pickpocket, and more still will take the cash out of a wallet they've found before turning it in.
The point of creating friction is that it's the friction that keeps most people in line. A bike lock isn't going to protect your bike from being stolen by someone who is okay with being a bike thief, but if you leave your bike out without a lock, you've just opened yourself up to having it stolen by a much, much larger portion of the population who don't see themselves as "thieves" as they commit theft.
You can just look at what's happened on SF transit. SF has (intentionally) created a system where you technically don't have to scan your card to get on the bus if you have a monthly pass or use the iphone version of payment... the result is a shitload of people who would otherwise pay for the bus if you had to scan your card, and everyone knew you were cheating the system if you don't, they just don't pay now. If you make it easy for people to be bad actors, more people will be bad actors.
Monero in particular absolutely terrifies governments and financial institutions - you can tell because it's been banned and delisted practically everywhere. This gives me great confidence in it. Not as a speculative asset, but as a means of having truly private transactions.
Bitcoin advocates pivoted on Bitcoin being a currency after it, to be brutally honest, failed to function as a currency. Last few times I transacted BTC, the fees were anywhere between $5 and $15 and the transaction times were more than 1hr. Not to mention the whole world can see all of your transactions.
So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".
When you pay the 1.5% visa transaction, you don't get that.
And you don't need that for buying a coffee, or almost anything.
Microtransactions are just not a good use-case for the Bitcoin network.
The drawback with anything beyond Bitcoin is that in order to buy those currencies, you need Bitcoin. There is an extreme correlation with the price of Bitcoin and every other cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin's current hashrate is 95 Petahashes/second, while Litecoin is 2.35 PH/s.
I suppose both are big enough that one does not have to worry about the network being easily hijacked.
But when you get below a certain point, the price for taking over the head of the chain temporarily is a real amount of money, not an astronomical one.
Nano has a completely different security model though, and isn't nearly as secure/decentralized as Bitcoin/Litecoin/Monero and other standard POW based cryptocurrencies.
> isn't nearly as secure/decentralized as Bitcoin/Litecoin/Monero and other standard POW based cryptocurrencies.
That's not remotely true. Nano is up and running like 9 years now and has survived countless spam attacks. The last attacks have gone completely unnoticed except by people watching for them.
As a non-inflationary feeless currency it's inherently far more decentralized, and tends to decentralize over time.
Why on earth would POW be the standard when block lattice is better in literally every way? It's faster, safer, and 10x more efficient than a Visa transaction.
And then there's quantum resistance.
Why do people on a tech site full of 'smart' people let statements that wrong go unremarked. It's weird.
It's like someone was saying, watermills are great because they can help you mill your flour. Someone else chimes in like, hey, you can actually just get a wind turbine or a solar panel now; it's way more efficient... And then you - a year old account with -1 karma - jump in saying, 'lol solar power shills still exist?!'.
Like... Who's the shill here? How much BTC is in your bag?
These are the real Cypherpunk coins. Specially Monero. The premise behind Cryptocurrencies, (before crypto-bros joined), were all about distributed control, privacy, and censorship avoidance.
If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.
If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
And vitalik.eth was just essaying on how important privacy protocols are and how Ethereum must adopt them... Let EU ban ETH then and shift closer to the caveman era and be even more laughing stock for the (expectedly) more crypto-friendly US.
I wonder what the impact will be on ransomware attacks.
It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
As of now paying for a ransomware in btc is still quite hard, at least in europe.
A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
My understanding is most ransoms are already paid in bitcoin. (or some other public ledger coin?) Privacy coins would probably be preferable for criminals to receive but they aren't as easy to purchase as bitcoin which I'd imagine significantly reduces the likelihood they get paid at all. Since most of these ransomware groups are hosted in countries with uncooperative governments the public ledger isn't really an impediment anyway.
No, because KYC is about the customer, not product. In the same way that you're not required to sell only trackable microcontrollers for example, only that you can show who you sold them to, not where they went onwards.
Haveno already works by providing p2p multisignature escrow. With this design, you need to match with an individual and do a direct exchange. There is a Tor-based application
BasicSwap has another model with noncustodial atomic swaps and some sort of decentralised orderbook.
I expect that Serai will be much more effective than those. It will launch soon with a liquidity pool design, similar to Uniswap for Ethereum. With this model, other people can profit by providing liquidity for pools. It will be very easy for anyone to initiate a trade and do an exchange for a different currency from the pool. It will be incorporated into the most popular mobile app Cakewallet, so it should be accessible even for non-technical users and quickly gain adoption. I think this has the potential to provide an even more convenient, generally superior experience compared to centralised exchanges.
I wonder what benefit to society might having a shadow financial system bring? I can't think of any, except for financing entities operating outside lawful limits.
> I can't think of any, except for financing entities operating outside lawful limits.
The idea is that "lawful limits", even if you wholeheartedly support them now, can change at a whim if a new government is elected or a war starts or some other major crisis happens. These things come and go every few decades, one is not improbable to occur within the frame of your lifetime and place of residence.
Hong Kong protestors were tracked by looking at their purchases of public transport tickets. Canada froze the bank accounts of those involved in protests also. Wikileaks had to rely on cryptocurrency for funding and donations could be tracked otherwise. From this I see a trend that shows it is critical for democracy, don't you?
i think the whole point for many is freedom from tyranny. just because there are laws around how you're allowed to store and move around things that you own doesn't mean those laws are morally or ethically well-founded.
"Tyranny" has a negative connotation to it, but cultures vary, laws are not universal, and also people have different values - if you live somewhere where you can't otherwise transact, a private cryptocurrency may be a way out for you.
Or anything that the government don't like. Like donation to an opposition, journalists, etc. That's why authoritarian governments are first to fight the financial privacy / independence.
It's obvious - freedom from pesky taxes, declaring your assets and profits, buying banned goods, avoiding sanctions on the dozens of dictatorships and autocracies across the world, allow buying and selling resources and weapons to and from sanctioned countries. The whole package :)
For example the fact that ruzzia ha such a stable budget for 3 years in row is not in a last part due to the token system, where they can trade with Iran, China, and others and launder tokens through UAE/SA/Qatar exchanges etc.
> Under the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) will be prohibited from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, such as Monero
This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.
People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
> I want fully private transactions over the internet
The big problem seems to be that then you allow for arbitrary speculation, causing high volatility, and scarcity of reliable ways to exchange the money, because no organisation that could otherwise stabilise the exchange rate can put their name to fully private transactions.
> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Cash too is becoming more and more restricted over time. Large denominations are removed from circulation, transactions above certain threshold are made illegal, limits are put on cash withdrawals per day and per month.
Realistically the current trajectory of the EU is "less and less private transactions until there are none in a couple of decades".
The EU's legislation has been decidedly mixed, and not an unalloyed good. Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply. I had some hope of the EU being that, but both the US and the EU have trended towards homogenization. I wonder if, in a hundred years, the EU government will claim as much power at the EU-wide level as the US federal government.
So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
So the thing about physical cash is that handling it gets (roughly) linearly harder with the amount. Whether that's coins, notes, silver, gold or whatever. It is relatively easy to hand over $100 for private purposes, but it is seriously difficult to move $100,000,000 without attracting attention.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
Do you have any example of when these powers were abused?
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
> consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
> Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply.
ROFL! Are you suggesting there is no framework? Do the basic research before spouting your propaganda!
Oh like Chat Control? Don't be mistaken, most countries in the EU ultimately do not respect your privacy and wish to have access to your private correspondence, in addition to preventing you from carrying out private digital transactions, just as we have been doing with physical money for thousands of years.
No, it means that privacy on cryptocurrency is the major driver of corruptions and tax fraud, and it's important to remove any privacy around these topics.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
The banners are not mandated by law. That's an implementation choice. Websites chose to show you annoying banners to make you annoyed with the law. They could just not track you.
Yes, the vast majority of the websites are just being annoying because they are childish. It has nothing to do with the law.
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
The vast majority of websites are obnoxious with consent prompts because they have a clear profit motive that is achieved by harassing and tricking people into giving them permission to abuse their privacy for profit, but I'm sure you know that.
Sob stories about companies being forced to reckon with their unethical business practices in the face of new laws are nothing new. Companies that profit from playing fast and loose with people's personal data complain about the hardships of following GDPR, food companies complain that the limits for cancer-causing chemicals and heavy metals are too low, and factories complain that they should be allowed to dump toxic waste in the rivers.
And employees working for those companies often pick up these sorts of irrational views by osmosis to preserve social cohesion within the company.
I mildly recall them looking to do something about the sort of malicious compliance that cookie banners are, but I haven't been following that work too closely.
By definition, they are criminals because they are breaking the law.
And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for.
Remember, it was tax evasion that the government was able to convict Al Capone on, not his other activities. And also a simple traffic stop for an expired registration or inactive taillight that has put many possessors of a small amount of marijuana in jail.
> And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for.
The EU doesn't have a government in the sense you're talking to, it has regulatory bodies and a council, the individual countries make up the enactment of their laws and regulations in the EU, there is Interpol and Europol but these work usually in conjunction with a countries governments on large scale/impact crimes where cross border jurisdiction is required.
Yes and if they are caught they will be prosecuted and punished like with any other ban. Converting a significant amount of Monero into actual money will become much harder if its illegal. This will reduce availability of such services and make privacy coins less attractive to criminals which is exactly what the ban is aiming for.
Well yes I do - I have changed my mind in the past through discussion with others, so I think that there's value on arguing against a given position that I don't share.
(And, for what is worth, I also think that there are good and bad acts in the world, and that it makes sense to legislate around them.)
What I think is that your argument is in bad faith and breaking HN rules.
The governments, being useless and focusing on the wrong things, are banning objectively non-nefarious objects (ninja swords, anonymous coins) that can be use for good by good actors (cutting stuff in the garden, sending money in privacy) but are sometimes used for evil by bad actors (murder, money laundering), like many other things.
How can rape and murder ever be used for good by the general public? Did you ever meet someone in need of a legit rape/murder in the name of good? How can you possibly make such a comparison? Honestly!
Banning a tool doesn't stop the criminals from committing crimes that are already illegal, it's just removing a tool from the law abiding citizen.
They aren't comparing those crimes. You don't get to pick and choose where laws should matter based on whether you personally like the item being banned. Your "bad guys will do it anyway" argument doesn’t hold.
The argument would be that your "non-nefarious" use is just not that important. Cutting stuff in your garden with your ninja sword or sending money in privacy with your fake money is just not something anybody gives a shit about you being able to do.
My best interpretation of their comment would be that to ban owning ninja swords or rape does not prevent either from happening 100% of the time. But it's still the 'right' thing to do and prevents it some of the time.
Wait, are you talking about like using a Ninja sword as a gardening tool?
Or do you mean something like playing Fruit Ninja IRL in your backyard, chopping up watermelons and other fruits being thrown around in the air, for fun?
The swinging bladed tool people might use for gardening is a machete, which (absurdly) is banned under separate legislation along with "zombie knives", whatever the hell that is (some sort of serration?)
You have to understand that as a headline factory. The Offensive Weapons Act already prohibits carrying anything with the intent of using it as a weapon. Police routinely confiscate kitchen knives from the pockets of young men in stop-and-search. The specific bans on specific weapons are part of a stupid media cycle where a crime is carried out using a fancy weapon so the government legislates against that specific weapon. It's like trying to outlaw cryptocurrencies by banning them by name one at a time. It's incredibly stupid but a tradition of UK politics because it's easier than trying to untangle the actual problems of knife crime.
It's also a UK thing, not an EU thing. There isn't an EU level knife directive, rules vary; Czechia and Finland seem to be loosest from some brief googling.
I would think that most of the things that require privacy in a payment are more or less shady, except for the few % of people really into tech that can't be traced back
I'm not either pro or against such bans because I'm not well versed into the crypto universe (just like almost anyone else) though
Yeah sorry if you think that! I was just (admittedly, in passing, and through a one-liner), pointing to the fact that I don't think that your argument is really solid. There are already other comments expanding on that so I won't reiterate.
Finally. It's a failed experiment by grifters and suckers. It had it's chance at being useful, time to get it out of public conscience so we can work on actual issues.
Monero does -exactly- what it is designed to do and is used by plenty of people for real transactions not just speculation. Grifters always gonna grift.
Have you read the article ? The currencies are not being BANNED, simply anonymous accounts are, this is standard practice in financial institutions where you're required to Know Your Customer (KYC) and provide Anti Money Laundering (AML) provisions.
I have. Handling Monero, presumably for real currency conversions, is banned. If that were done for Bitcoin worldwide, the price would collapse, because it is no longer useful for, e.g., sanctions evasion.
By the way, the article itself claims:
"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."
Cointelegraph very often exaggerates and writes in an inaccurate way, it should never be used as a reliable source of information. You can see the real information here which makes it clear that it only applies to exchanges: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".