Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchook | Hacker News Reader

In practice, we still require ID verification to participate in markets.

Some markets. All kinds of financial transactions are happening as we speak in various DeFi ecosystems on a permissionless basis - you don't need an account, just a wallet.

Before say "your wallet is your account", only sort of. You can have any number of wallets through any number of applications that support it, including rolling your own if you so chose. Certainly nothing like the KYC/AML required of, say, Robinhood.

Examples?

Loans, derivatives, providing liquidity to AMMs, lots of other things going on.

Here's a list of the big ones on Ethereum:

https://dappradar.com/defi

We’re talking about the government here, it’s entirely reasonable to assume they’re going to start regulating this kind of thing by imposing rules on citizens.

How are they going to regulate defi?

The most likely thing is to add onerous reporting rules on US citizens since they can’t directly change any of these protocols. Or, declare that participating in DeFi without a license is illegal. Again, they can’t ban DeFi because it’s decentralized but they can certainly regulate you and I’s interaction with said systems.

Not really. And for those cases that do, we only require it with the merchant, not the central bank.

That's not true for most markets in the world.

Makes me wonder the total volume of anonymous trades compared to ID-verified trades.

A lot of art trades probably happen anonymously or atleast behind brokers who keep their client identities hidden.

I bet that the vast majority of leaf node food purchases on Earth are in cash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com