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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine in Vietnam needed some quick cash to go home for Tet holiday and asked me for help in paying for their travel costs and some spending money. Nothing nefarious, just a few hundred USD. I'm happy to help them.

I went to a popular VN crypto website, put in their name and bank account number and how much I wanted to send them (and on what crypto network and token, as they support a bunch of them). The site spit out an address to send the tokens to with my wallet.

The transaction cost me $0.05, the conversion rates were totally fair and actually quite good, it only took a couple hours, and as an added bonus, didn't even require any sort of KYC because it was just a small amount of money.

For those of you dumping on crypto, I can tell you that it doesn't get any easier than that. There is no way that I can do something like that otherwise. We need more of this, not less.

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The lack of KYC enforcement is likely to be a temporary situation. Cryptocurrency exchanges have kind of flown under the radar in some countries. But for better or worse, crackdowns are coming.

This use of crypto is fundamentally no different from the old hawala networks, just more automated and slightly cheaper. Authorities let that go for a while but then cracked down when criminal usage grew too serious to ignore.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hawala.asp

This exchange has been operating legally in Vietnam since 2014. Not exactly the most "open" country out there.

I've met the founder in person. Very nice guy and not even Vietnamese!

If you amortise the kyc cost then wise or similar does this just as frictionless. Basically, crypto does not solve any real world problems that don't have other solutions.

Kyc exists for a reason, the same friction free transfer beneath your mental limit can be rerun 10000x by machine and achieve aml outcomes.

Of course I've used Wise to send money. It was full of confusing KYC friction that took several days to resolve. Cost more than $0.05, took more than a few hours to complete, didn't allow me to use my own currency (crypto) and required my friend to also setup a Wise account and go through the same contortions on their end.

KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports. Security theater at its finest. It is also easily circumvented too, making it questionable at best [0].

Lastly, saying something doesn't solve a real world problem, after I just explained to you that it does, is mind blowing absurd.

[0] https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1754514949995384996

You're criticizing GP for taking an absolutist position ("Crypto is useless") but then doing the same yourself ("KYC is useless").

Eh? You just made up the quote for the OP (and me for that matter), which implies that you're just inserting your own opinion.

Yeah I paraphrased. But was it really so wrong? (Btw I didn't downvote you if it matters)

"KYC is useless" is a reasonable summary of "KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems".

And is there a big difference between "Crypto is useless" and "crypto does not solve any real world problems"?

Paraphrasing on absolutist positions seems pretty wrong to me if that is the point you're trying to make.

I could have left the KYC portion off of the original comment and thus this one point feels like a festering wound for a meth addict (anti-crypto HN) to pick at instead of being focused on the larger message.

Regardless, we are off in the weeds debating about the word "useless" (a word neither the OP nor I never used), when it really has nothing to do with my original post at this point. This isn't interesting to discuss, so I'll stop now. Thanks.

KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports.

I love this analogy.

I love crypto. I even built an SDK to make crypto payment easy [0] However, KYC is there for a reason. Personally, I don't touch any crypto on/offramp service without proper KYC

[0] https://1pay.network

> However, KYC is there for a reason.

You don't go on to explain that reason though, so let me explain it for anyone reading this.

The definition of KYC from my quick google search is:

"Know Your Customer (KYC) standards are designed to protect financial institutions against fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing."

Key words: "Protect financial institutions"

In other words, they don't protect the people using the system.

In this case, it is two friends a world apart who want to simply share some funds with each other. There is no institution here other than the use of fiat money on the receiving end (my friends bank account).

I would have preferred to just use crypto the whole way, but my friend doesn't know anything about it and I didn't want to bother them since they were so upset about not being able to be with their family during Tet.

So, I found a middleman that was willing to take my crypto and convert it to local currency, with very little effort or cost. In my eyes, there is absolutely nothing ethically wrong with what I did. Transactions like this do not and should not require government intervention. The fact that we've been so brainwashed to believe that they do, is just wrong.

Should or should not is besides the point. If you're interacting with the US financial system in any way, it's a requirement from that government. I can believe anything I want about how cannabis should be legal, my personal beliefs about that don't change the fact that I could be arrested for having some.

In this case, I am not interacting with the US financial system. I am sending my perfectly legal beanie babies to Vietnam.

I need to send money to VN from time to time. Would you mind sharing the name of the service you used?

Easily google'd. Shows up in the top 5 results for me.

Is there a particular reason you’re not saying the name?

Sure. I'm just trying to discuss a personal experience, not give referrals to a third party business. I'm also not that hard to find... if people wanted to reach out personally, that is fine too.

HN's jerk reaction reminds me a lot of the 5 monkeys and ladder experiment. I'm sure a lot of the people railing against crypto don't understand why they hate it or just look at the negatives. I'm confident that they would be just as hostile to cash if it was invented today.

The good news is that they don't matter. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. People like you and me are using it to transfer money, donate, and buy things. It doesn't have to be widely adopted to be useful, which is something that I find to be just grand :-)

People here railing against cryptocurrency are generally unable to see past its proclivity for scams. This is an entirely reasonable situation. Further, cryptocurrency proponents are historically completely unwilling to admit there are any flaws to the point that it’s obvious they have a stake in cryptocurrency and it’s severely biasing their judgement.

You don’t seem like that per se but if you haven’t seen it before you haven’t been watching.

I have a stake in it and I'm willing to admit it is full of scams. Fact is though, ALL finance is full of scams. I'd argue that the inverse is true... people in traditional finance hate on crypto because it actually exposes the fact that their own stuff is full of scams. Case in point:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...

Somewhat off topic but I only recently learned that that monkeys and ladder experiment never happened, it's just a thought experiment or story to illustrate the point. But the closest real experiments were not nearly as dramatic and didn't have as strong of results.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/games-primates-pla...

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