KYC is unavoidable for financial products.
The point is that the world's largest privacy abuser can now directly tie all of your online habits to your government issued ID.
The implications here are staggering.
And guess what Facebook etc. are requiring at login. Phone numbers. For security they claim, yet they send spam messages to the number.
Id be pretty shocked if anybody here had a FB account, under a pseudonym, and they actually believed they were keeping their true identity hidden from FB. If you have an account, they know who you are. Verifying your ID is a due diligence on their part to CYA.
How many people, saying they would never give info over to FB, willingly hand it over to the fintechs like Robinhood?
I think you could have gotten your point across without the rudeness. Talking to people like that creates a toxic environment.
I fully agree that there is no way I'm giving that info to FB. I noped out of running ads with them because they wanted my ID. My privacy is invaded enough by them, no thanks.
Thank you for calling this out. To some, this may seem like over-reaction, but only by calling even minimally rude statements out can we ensure that HN doesn't become Reddit.
You can, today, do high margin longs and shorts (dYdX), collatoralized loans (Maker, Compound), buy and sell derivatives (Synthetix), and buy into funds run by fund managers (Set Protocol) without any KYC. Even as an American, though these services will be more important to South Americans, Africans, and Southeast Asians.
KYC will still be used by old firms in rich countries, but it's not a given for the future of finance and most people will likely opt out as it's more trouble than it's worth and exposes you to identity theft when one of those firms is hacked and your personal data is stolen by criminals. It's just easier, faster, and safer to not use KYC.
Source - work with Asian and American banks on KYC.
These people always have the option of using the services I listed. Anyone can. They are free and unstoppable for anyone who needs them regardless of nationality, race, status, etc.
So the main goal of the blockchain part is to have friends (the Libra association) between which the responsibility is shared. It dilutes concerns and deflects issues: the headlines won’t be “Facebook faces regulatory sanctions” but “The Libra association (Facebook, Uber, Spotify, …) faces regulatory sanctions”.
Or at least that was their hope initially. The press, or the regulator, may have pushed scrutiny on Mastercard had they stayed involved, but I doubt they will assume that Spotify is responsible if something wrong happens in the Libra association.
But fundamentally, the creation of consensus on transactional history merely elects a leader, and other companies’ servers only record the leader’s blockchain.
Additionally, the assets backing the payment system are the real meat behind enabling this technology. And unlike traditional banking, Facebook & cie maintain control over those assets regardless of which company handles the Libra account.
Banks can handle your payments because they have ownership of your deposits, but funds do leave the bank when performing a transfer (ACH, SWIFT, etc.) to another bank.
In Libra, the assets remain controlled by the Libra association even when making a transfer from one Libra app to another, eg. from Novi to Spotify.
My country (Serbia) that's not in the EU had quite a bit of drama due to sending personally identifiable private citizen data (i.e. first and last name, specific personal info, ID card number, unique personal identifier) over Cloudflare which does not currently have a legal representative according to the Serbian Data Protection Regulation, which makes it illegal for the government or any other data processor to send ANYTHING to Cloudflare because Serbia is not in the EU and even though GDPR and ZZPL (our version) are literally identical (to prepare for EU-integrations), GDPR only applies to citizens of countries that are right now in the EU.
So, I don't think some people or [all] governments will like this. At all.
edit: And yes, SHARE Foundation did sue Google, Facebook, and all other tech giants (including infrastructure providers) in Serbia for ZZPL but apparently only Google appointed a legal representative in Belgrade, and even that seems like a "PR stunt", given how weakly GDPR is being enforced, and it is backed by the whole of EU. No other company replied or appeared in court.