You can't just put "No Americans (no proof needed)" on a US based website with a lot of US citizen clients dealing in synthetic USD products that's 110% non compliant with almost any US law and expect a nice outcome. Not with those sort of assets and market share.
Not American and I'm annoyed by the US pretty frequently but I'm not really sure why the US having teeth when it comes to clamping down on global money laundering is a bad thing.
The financial sector appears to be the one sector where US authorities actually do a good job to stamp out crime, and I can obviously understand why the US will not tolerate an completely unmonitored shadow economy that could easily be used for sanction avoidance by Iran or any other rogue state.
I'd give the US more points for enforcement (which you are correct is strongly pursued) if I thought the laws being enforced were less self serving in the first place...
Drug cartels in the western hemisphere turn out to be pretty violent, to the point where you can think of them as terrorists -- bombings and other mass casualty events.
The other point you make is valid, though.
Sigma-Aldrich and Bayer don't seem like terrorist organizations to me. Or perhaps I missed the headline where Pfizer was caught beheading people?
Terrorist companies would be smarter than that. Sell and market a highly addictive, deadly drug, and profit from it making it look like it's all above board.
Then they blame the users for getting hooked on it on the first place after getting the doctors to prescribe it heavily using kickbacks. And thousands upon thousands of people die.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sackler-familys...
You, as a non-US citizen, can do any transaction you want with BitMEX. BitMEX, as a company with US presence in NY, must make sure that you are not a US citizen (maybe based on your declaration that you are not one).
Yeah, they're really great at that /s. It wasn't just last month that it was revealed that US banks laundered $2T. How many people got arrested for that? The Fed even said the disclosure of the banks internal reports was the crime.
https://www.rferl.org/a/global-banks-reported-2-trillion-in-...
Not really surprising that increasing numbers of people would just stop caring about breaking such laws.
I just hope this witch-hunt doesn't end the same as the Dread Pirate Roberts case for the government's political game on controlling cryptocurrencies and maintaining their monopoly over the financial system. Hayes is a great comedic writer and insightful analyst on the global financial system -- I highly recommend his posts on the Bitmex blog. However, I fear the tongue and cheek and comedy will be used against him in the case.
* They went after Kik and Telegram also
They basically don't want anyone to have any option to bypass the Petrodollar
The complaint alleges that the check for a US IP address only happened once and that they did not take any precautions against VPN usage, so as long as you VPN'd once, you could login from US addresses as much as you wanted afterwards.
Furthermore, the complaint alleges that the company leadership received analytics reports broken down by country, including the US; and that the team did not monitor the funds from a hack in 2018, which allowed the hackers to launder those funds.
These allegations may be false, but the case seems strong that Bitmex 1. served US customers, 2. did not comply with the necessary US regulations to serve those customers.
I petitioned support and was unable to get my account restored.
--
It's impossible to monitor EVERY single hack in the crypto space, but BitMEX has actively worked to do their best to track and freeze hack funds.
Their customer service is incredible, when I had an issue with their API, I got a direct response from the CTO fixing my code for me, within the same hour.
When I had a dispute with instrument methodology, one of the founders got back to me in the same day, explaining why.
It has never been hacked or suffered a serious security breach. The only thing I remember was a one-time accidental CC instead of BCC in the newsletter program.
BitMEX immediately closes the accounts of anyone who ever signs in with a US IP, no matter what. I've been there: my bitmex account is permanently closed because I signed into it while I was holidaying to the USA.
They _are_ world policing.
I legit thought it would've been reduced with Trump because of his isolationist positioning. I guess this is going to be the norm for a distant future. I don't see how this box is closed without an aggressive shift in Geopolitics. I don't see how this would be a peaceful transition but if you see a solution like that, I'd love to hear!
(edited for formatting)
He's very good at convincing people he supports their ideological position when he's really just using it to justify what he wants to do right now for his own reasons and will drop it the second it's not useful. That whys he's anti China until he has to actually take an action on China or exporting jobs or crime and punishment etc. :(