No More KYC with ShapeShift
erikvoorhees.medium.com
erikvoorhees.medium.com
So glad to see this view rising up. When so many private and public parties are required to collect my private data, how can it remain private? I've had unemployment claims made in my name this year due to a breach, and it was on me to fight the fraud that would harm me. The collection of private data does not protect us, it results in a honeypot and puts us at risk.
If our values speak to you, and you're a security researcher - WE ARE HIRING
https://shapeshift.com/careers
In liberty,
--Michael
Note that Banxa performs their own KYC for their own MSB services.
Once you have some crypto, you can then trade it for other crypto with a few taps on your smartphone, or clicks in your browser.
Search your smartphone's app store for ShapeShift and give it a whirl yourself :)
Ok and so does Coinbase. So at any point I, an American citizen, must do some level of KYC.
Is the idea that I can simply buy Crypto from another exchange and then send the hash to another wallet on your platform (where KYC isn't performed)?
> Search your smartphone's app store for ShapeShift and give it a whirl yourself :)
No offense, but I won't. It's hard for me to trust a wallet that clearly (or technically unclearly) is operating in a grey area of the law.
If the Bitcoin network is charging 0.00066 BTC for a transaction, ShapeShift passes this charge through to users transparently.
We do!
Every ShapeShift employee has equity and has opportunities to earn more. It is vitally important that our employees benefit from ShapeShift's successes and I'm proud to be a ShapeShift employee.
More important to me than equity is the feelings of accomplishment and camaraderie that we already feel for building such a great platform that holds user privacy and self-sovereignty above all else.
Broadly, where do you see the company in 5-10 years :) What makes you bullish about it!
Monero doesn't enable privacy by default, but its known as a privacy coin. The first means that people could be unaware of the extra steps they need to take to get privacy, but the second is the risky one.
Monero is known as a privacy coin and this makes it the target of governments that indeed made ShapeShift start to to KYC a year or more ago.
Monero is unduly targeted for standard features because governments don't like perfect privacy...
The good news is that privacy does not have to be built in to a coin for it to be capable of giving privacy. If we reverse the Monero situation we might get something that is actually useful for the majority of us. A coin like Bitcoin that doesn't have more than semi-privacy can have mixing added to become private.
Now, mixing as historically done on BTC is both expensive and centralized, which has caused several servers to be confiscated and people arrested. Again, governments really don't like what you do with your money being private.
I'm personally a big fan of https://cashfusion.org ticks all these boxes. It is built on a semi-private (bitcoin-like) coin and it solves the other problems as well with a mix (sorry, fusion) costing you nearly nothing.
It does in fact enable privacy by default. If you want to show someone the details of a transaction or an address balance, you have to provide viewkeys.
> I'm personally a big fan of
Now your comment reads like an attempt to shill, which would explain the misinformation about Monero.
According to HN's rules, I have to assume you have better intentions than that. Please explain what you meant, since I must have misunderstood you.
Ok, my statement was maybe too black/white and you jumped on top of that. The point is that Monero has Privacy level / mixin settings, the default is not completely open, but certainly doesn't qualify as super private either.
> Now your comment reads like an attempt to shill
I shared a link to a product that I feel is very successful in reaching privacy. I have no ties to this product (though I have used it).
What are you even talking about?
I'm sorry but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about
>Monero doesn't enable privacy by default, but its known as a privacy coin. The first means that people could be unaware of the extra steps they need to take to get privacy
That is erroneous.
Absolutely, we are in agreement.
The point I was making is that the coin itself, the base protocols, adding these privacy options makes it the difference between a generic payment protocol and one specifically made to evade the governments controls.
There being a way to do great privacy while leaving the coin itself to be a generic payment coin gives you the best of both worlds.
The point you make is still true, it is required for privacy to be default on. And this can be included in one wallet that people use for this purpose. Now its the choice of wallet that makes the privacy, not the choice of coin.
Reading this, I get the hacker vibe: "The law says this, but I came up with this clever hack so it does not apply to me."
Unfortunately for this view, the law and judges who apply the law care a lot about intent, and are not very impressed by "hacks" of the law. Advertising that you are doing an end-around KYC, is something that a judge will find very interesting if this comes to court.
In addition, KYC is a big priority of the US Treasury department and there is pretty bipartisan support for it.
Basically, the US Treasury Department does not want any company to facilitate large money transfers anonymously. If you are doing that, they will likely come after you, despite whatever clever legal "hacks" you may think you have.
I don't see this ending well.
What will be interesting to see is if these views are physically enforceable.
Having more technical details would be interesting.
The difference between coins and shares is such that shares can only legally be owned by a very very small number of people that are licensed to. You can ask them to buy and give you a certificate, but you yourself probably are not one of the few that can own stock. (series 7 in https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financialcareers/07/se...)
On the contrary, coins like these can be bought and sold by anyone. And this makes the balance very different. Should you see the company do stupid things, you can sell your coins in a very short time for nearly no cost and without asking for permission or waiting for banking-hours. Noteworthy is that you can sell them to anyone on the Internet.
Naturally, such companies (and there are quite a lot doing this today) pay out dividends as well. Typically to coin-holders addresses they arrange an air-drop. So simply you own 1000 and they pay 10 extra to that address.
Other strategies are buy-backs when the company is profitable which are meant to make the price go up because there is more demand than supply.
As you can see, there are quite a lot of similarities to stocks, and certainly also differences.
Yes, a company that promises to never make a profit, pay out any dividends to its shareholders, or buyback stocks is a pyramid scheme. Your statement here is a bit like saying a credit card is just like bank robbery, if there's no obligation to pay off the balance.
> With no incoming revenue []
I didn't want to be an ass to point this out, seems I confused you instead.
Generally even loss-leading plays that try to create a huge community before monetization still have plans to monetize that community. I asked how this is different from a pyramid scheme/Ponzi scheme. I don't feel like you actually addressed this point. How will ShapeShift make money on connecting these users in a way that doesn't require following KYC rules?
Keep track of all your assets, what you bought and sold them for, and tell your accountant if you have one. Or learn the tax laws surrounding capital gains.
"Against evil"...now where have I heard that before...
Translation: "We, a private corporation, get to determine what good and evil is. YMMV how/why you qualify for either or."
Whereas you doing full KYC with most companies, who are by law also forced to determine who is a bad actor, doesn't scare you?
What's your point? Facebook is a collection of individuals, but if Zuck wants political ads barred from his platform he can snap his fingers and make it happen.
Having individual private companies become the arbiters of justice for good/bad actors is not a sound resolution...especially when it comes to fraud/identify theft.
And what's the alternative? Who is the decision outsourced to if not the individual/company?
KYC is a regulation requirement, so then the government.
I can gaslight my spouse into insanity if I want completely legally. I guess that isn't evil since there is no law against it.