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This comment was marked [dead] when I read it. I vouched it back into visibility. I wish people would respond with a comment if they disagree, rather than repor

This comment was marked [dead] when I read it. I vouched it back into visibility. I wish people would respond with a comment if they disagree, rather than reporting it. Meta-comment aside, there’s another population segment who suffer from overbearing AML/KYC regulations - homeless people. Many homeless people do not have any form of ID and hence cannot open a bank account. What option do they have? I would argue for low value accounts, say <$5000 annual transaction volume, AML/KYC enforcement should not be required. $5000 is such a small amount in the grand scheme of money laundering that the government should really focus on the bigger fish. Splitting your laundered money into many bank accounts would, or could, fall under existing structuring laws and would be easily detectable by any bank. I haven’t even mentioned that in many countries, such as the US, you have absolutely no guaranteed right to banking access. Your access to banking can be shut off overnight by any one of the various middle men involved. Until these things are solved, and legal persons can be guaranteed access to banking then crypto is necessary.

ben_w 3y ago
Here's a trilemma: 1. Everyone should have access to banking, and a $5k nominal/year in most of the G7 economies[0] is small enough it shouldn't attract attention. 2. If you don't require proof of ID, you can't stop people signing up for as many small accounts as they want to. 3. Homeless people may not have any formal proof of ID (either because it's too expensive, or as a direct consequence of why they're homeless in the first place[1]). You can try to get around #3 with biometrics. But even with AI assistance, the goal here is to prove a person isn't already on the system — which is much harder than merely showing they're the same person as on the ID card they have with them, for reasons which are basically a generalisation of the Birthday problem[2]. [0] one of the G7 is the EU, the worst of the EU is Bulgaria at €12400 GDP (nominal) per capita, Wikipedia reports that "More than a fifth of the labour force work for a minimum wage of $1.16 per hour.[203]" but that citation (which follows) is from 2012 and this is where I stopped going down the rabbit hole: https://web.archive.org/web/20121224023912/http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-20122012-AP/EN/3-20122012-AP-EN.PDF https://web.archive.org/web/20121224023912/http://epp.eurost... [1] off the top of my head: because they ran away from home as a minor and didn't take sufficient documentation with them; or because they had an untreated mental health problem; or because they're an unregistered migrant; or because they were born in the country but out of the system. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
- null0pointer 3y ago
  You’ve struck on an interesting problem in decentralized systems, Sybil attacks [0]. How do you prevent someone from registering multiple accounts and pretending to be multiple people? In Bitcoin, and other cryptos, the problem is ignored because it doesn’t matter at the address level since you have the same amount of bitcoin no matter how many addresses it’s split between. However, in other systems within the crypto-ecosystem it may be desirable to establish a 1:1 human:account ratio. This is exactly what Sam Altman was/is trying to solve with his WorldCoin thing which also uses biometrics (I’d personally not sign up for WorldCoin and advise against it for others). Largely it remains an unsolved problem AFAIK. Jumping back to banking the homeless, I mentioned in the previous comment that if criminals tried to use these small accounts to launder money it should be relatively easily detectable by the banks. I would add that I don’t think it’s a problem if a given homeless person opens N of these accounts for small values of N since that would still be a small total cashflow volume. The main things I’m interested in with such a scheme would be allowing homeless people to have somewhere to store what little money they have without risk of having it robbed from them [1], allowing them to have a normal way to get paid from any job they might work, and allowing them to purchase things online (perhaps delivered to an Amazon locker or other pickup location). I’m not saying this idea is perfect, it certainly isn’t, but my point in the previous comment was that there are people who are underserved by the existing banking infrastructure. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack 1: They could authenticate with an account number or card and a PIN at an ATM. Here opening multiple accounts would be an advantage for the security conscious because they could open a duress account and put a fraction of their money in it to withdraw if they were ever forced to by a robber.
zxt_tzx 3y ago
I’m new to HN, could I check how does this report/vouching thing work? If someone is new and their comments get reported (because people disagree? or must there be a violation of the site guidelines), then the comment would be marked as dead and thus hidden? Who can vouch for these users then? Is there an upvote/downvote mechanism too that’s not visible to me because I’m a new user?
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  There’s an account setting to show dead comments. You may also need some minimum amount of karma to vouch, not sure.
  - zxt_tzx 3y ago
    Thank you for the reply, good to know!
CrazyStat 3y ago
> This comment was marked [dead] when I read it. I vouched it back into visibility. I wish people would respond with a comment if they disagree, rather than reporting it. Comments from brand new accounts (as in this case) are marked dead by default as a spam prevention measure, I believe.
anon_trader 3y ago
Thank you. I preferred to register a throwaway for obvious privacy reasons, immediately got shadowbanned, and while I refrained from posting the actual article link [1] that I mentioned, that did not really help. [1] (Russian) https://vc.ru/relife/928248-50-bankov-kotorye-chashche-vsego-ne-otkryvayut-ili-blokiruyut-scheta-rossiyan https://vc.ru/relife/928248-50-bankov-kotorye-chashche-vsego...

ben_w 3y ago

Here's a trilemma: 1. Everyone should have access to banking, and a $5k nominal/year in most of the G7 economies[0] is small enough it shouldn't attract attention. 2. If you don't require proof of ID, you can't stop people signing up for as many small accounts as they want to. 3. Homeless people may not have any formal proof of ID (either because it's too expensive, or as a direct consequence of why they're homeless in the first place[1]). You can try to get around #3 with biometrics. But even with AI assistance, the goal here is to prove a person isn't already on the system — which is much harder than merely showing they're the same person as on the ID card they have with them, for reasons which are basically a generalisation of the Birthday problem[2]. [0] one of the G7 is the EU, the worst of the EU is Bulgaria at €12400 GDP (nominal) per capita, Wikipedia reports that "More than a fifth of the labour force work for a minimum wage of $1.16 per hour.[203]" but that citation (which follows) is from 2012 and this is where I stopped going down the rabbit hole: https://web.archive.org/web/20121224023912/http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-20122012-AP/EN/3-20122012-AP-EN.PDF https://web.archive.org/web/20121224023912/http://epp.eurost... [1] off the top of my head: because they ran away from home as a minor and didn't take sufficient documentation with them; or because they had an untreated mental health problem; or because they're an unregistered migrant; or because they were born in the country but out of the system. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

null0pointer 3y ago
You’ve struck on an interesting problem in decentralized systems, Sybil attacks [0]. How do you prevent someone from registering multiple accounts and pretending to be multiple people? In Bitcoin, and other cryptos, the problem is ignored because it doesn’t matter at the address level since you have the same amount of bitcoin no matter how many addresses it’s split between. However, in other systems within the crypto-ecosystem it may be desirable to establish a 1:1 human:account ratio. This is exactly what Sam Altman was/is trying to solve with his WorldCoin thing which also uses biometrics (I’d personally not sign up for WorldCoin and advise against it for others). Largely it remains an unsolved problem AFAIK. Jumping back to banking the homeless, I mentioned in the previous comment that if criminals tried to use these small accounts to launder money it should be relatively easily detectable by the banks. I would add that I don’t think it’s a problem if a given homeless person opens N of these accounts for small values of N since that would still be a small total cashflow volume. The main things I’m interested in with such a scheme would be allowing homeless people to have somewhere to store what little money they have without risk of having it robbed from them [1], allowing them to have a normal way to get paid from any job they might work, and allowing them to purchase things online (perhaps delivered to an Amazon locker or other pickup location). I’m not saying this idea is perfect, it certainly isn’t, but my point in the previous comment was that there are people who are underserved by the existing banking infrastructure. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack 1: They could authenticate with an account number or card and a PIN at an ATM. Here opening multiple accounts would be an advantage for the security conscious because they could open a duress account and put a fraction of their money in it to withdraw if they were ever forced to by a robber.

zxt_tzx 3y ago

I’m new to HN, could I check how does this report/vouching thing work? If someone is new and their comments get reported (because people disagree? or must there be a violation of the site guidelines), then the comment would be marked as dead and thus hidden? Who can vouch for these users then? Is there an upvote/downvote mechanism too that’s not visible to me because I’m a new user?

CrazyStat 3y ago
There’s an account setting to show dead comments. You may also need some minimum amount of karma to vouch, not sure.
- zxt_tzx 3y ago
  Thank you for the reply, good to know!

CrazyStat 3y ago

> This comment was marked [dead] when I read it. I vouched it back into visibility. I wish people would respond with a comment if they disagree, rather than reporting it. Comments from brand new accounts (as in this case) are marked dead by default as a spam prevention measure, I believe.

anon_trader 3y ago

Thank you. I preferred to register a throwaway for obvious privacy reasons, immediately got shadowbanned, and while I refrained from posting the actual article link [1] that I mentioned, that did not really help. [1] (Russian) https://vc.ru/relife/928248-50-bankov-kotorye-chashche-vsego-ne-otkryvayut-ili-blokiruyut-scheta-rossiyan https://vc.ru/relife/928248-50-bankov-kotorye-chashche-vsego...