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Comment by ivanmontillam | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree.

That oversight in theory is good. In practice it turns out to be: "The OFAC and FATF hate your people as a whole. We cannot service you anymore. Kthxbai."

I will trust regulators when regulators do not exclude people where systems would be most useful. It all boils down to: if you're not credit worthy, you must be a terrorist, capomafia or at best, a tax evader.

See what happened to Uphold[0], which is unfortunate.

[0]: https://support.uphold.com/hc/en-us/articles/6782239879451-W...

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'your people' has nothing to do with oversight of Binance. But I agree that oversight could be more precise in its goals and execution, however, and this is a big issue, it requires a well functioning, non-corrupt government in all countries participating backed by a non-corrupt police force and local financial authorities.

This is a problem in a large part of the world, and even in countries where these factors are present the size of the workforce available for regulatory oversight is usually only a small fraction of the size of the workforce available for the industry itself. That's why something like WireCard could happen in Germany. And even if the demise of WireCard also hit a lot of non-players that still doesn't mean that it isn't a good thing that they are gone.

> it requires a well functioning, non-corrupt government in all countries participating backed by a non-corrupt police force and local financial authorities.

In the current times, that's nothing realistically accessible to Argentinian and Venezuelan people.

Too much "ideal" conditions need to happen at the same time. What we need are practical solutions.

Practical solutions are not going to come cheap.

There are plenty of ways to transact money if you’re not creditworthy. What’s “missing” is a non-fraudulent way to get credit if you’re not creditworthy, and that has nothing to do with US enforcement of fraud and everything to do with the fact that only fraudulent lenders will lend to non-creditworthy people.

> everything to do with the fact that only fraudulent lenders will lend to non-creditworthy people.

Exactly, another thing that happens is that the ways money is exchanged for black markets[0] is also the way terrorists and tax evaders would use. So, we share the same "highway" and get classified as such.

But we aren't terrorists or tax evaders, we just need to make our lives less expensive.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33967480

> But we aren't terrorists or tax evaders

You aren't but you can bet that plenty of people even if they were not terrorists definitely were evading taxes by using these services, or at a minimum worsening the strength of the local currency. If enough people do that then the effect can be so strong that you end up leaving yourself no alternative. Obviously, a stable currency requires all parties to believe in it, and this is the first problem that any competent government would have to address.

> definitely were evading taxes by using these services,

I'm not condoning tax evasion, but in South America if you are on tax evasion and you're not wealthy then you evade taxes by ideological reasons.

As a South American citizen, you'd evade taxes for:

1) Choking the government, one cent at a time.

2) If you know the Treasury Dept. of the Local Govt. is going to be looted anyway by corrupt politicians, then why pay taxes? (the most common one).

It's very easy to loot the government, just bribe the Purchases Manager of any Govt. institution and pave your way to the local top elite.

And all of this is supposed to be an argument for the US not to enforce its laws against institutions that enable such activity?

I'm not saying that they shouldn't do it. I'm only exposing its consequences.

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