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Comment by coderintherye | Hacker News Reader

Even with banks, what they really need to know is that you are not laundering money and you pass KYC checks. Verifiable claims would be a way to pass those checks and get a bank account without the bank needing to store any of your personal info.

We're a long ways from that sort of thinking of course. And on that note, there are still an estimated 1.1 billion people in the world lack any recognized formal identity. There's a chance for many of them to leap frog us by going straight to digital identities rather than carrying around cards.

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A bank needs to be able to recheck every client's status any time the rules change (which happens on a weekly basis). If they don't hold adequate information about their clients, that would mean suspending their accounts until a new verifiable claim was provided.

> A bank needs to be able to recheck every client's status any time the rules change (which happens on a weekly basis). If they don't hold adequate information about their clients, that would mean suspending their accounts until a new verifiable claim was provided.

Exactly. Anyone who has had to deal with the OFAC list (which in reality is every single business in the US) knows that the more information you collect up front, the less disruptive of a user experience you can guarantee (for most users).

This is a bit disingenuous. KYC applies to the person/organization, not merely the role of counter party in a certain transaction, and has many use cases besides AML (AML regulation is externally forced on financial service providers as frankly they do not care, commercial exposure, both in terms of financial risk or brand image protection, is another thing which they do tend to care about more).

Verifiable claims in this context does not alleviate the need for Identity, it merely offers the ability to shift it to a third party. This is not a silver bullet, and depending on the use case you might prefer a bilateral transaction rather than on with a (designated mandatory) third party. While you might be happy that you can escape an over-inquisitive due diligence procedure of a party you suspect are collecting your personal data for reasons beyond the provided service, you might be less keen of needing to disclose a limited personal transaction to a central instance under the form of 3rd party attribute verification.

> Even with banks, what they really need to know is that you are not laundering money and you pass KYC checks. Verifiable claims would be a way to pass those checks and get a bank account without the bank needing to store any of your personal info.

> We're a long ways from that sort of thinking of course. And on that note, there are still an estimated 1.1 billion people in the world lack any recognized formal identity. There's a chance for many of them to leap frog us by going straight to digital identities rather than carrying around cards.

KYC literally means "know your customer". In what ways do you think that identify is superfluous to this notion? The purpose of KYC is not limited to hindering or prohibiting money laundering.

> KYC literally means "know your customer". In what ways do you think that identify is superfluous to this notion? The purpose of KYC is not limited to hindering or prohibiting money laundering.

What other legitimate purposes does it have?

Preventing transacting with known "terrorists" as according to the OFAC list (in the US at least)? That's just one other legitimate purpose.

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