For those who are interested in origins, a Coinbase sponsored protocol.
With Stripe moving into the space heavily and looking to lock things up in "Stripe-land", I think having an open protocol is great.
With Stripe moving into the space heavily and looking to lock things up in "Stripe-land", I think having an open protocol is great.
It's entirely possible then that some options would be available, for example in SEPA, that offer instant and irreversible settlement at zero cost.
And for crypto payments they already don't need this because they can use the de-facto-standard Metamask API, at least for Ethereum-compatible blockchains.
It's an economic and business problem, not a technical one: the incumbents earn massive fees and have very little incentive to innovate, while the disruptors can't reach the minimum critical mass they require to get rid of the damn credit cards (aka static passwords you need to disclose on the internet).
Note that SEPA is 100% not reversible. In fact, if you look at the scheme terms is absurdly reversible. There's a 8 week no questions asked refund window, so (for instance) one could pay your mortgage with SEPA and then automatically undebit their account up to 8 weeks later.
(Don't do this unless you're happy losing your property, not financial advice).
You might be referring to SEPA direct debit, which can be reversed unilaterally by the client at any point during the 8 weeks. These are payments initiated by the merchant, using an already established direct debit channel.
This is different from an API schema of a /payments/ endpoint being segregated from the actual resource that is being paid for.
In this model, the payment is the cost of entry for the resource request itself. It's not as directly applicable to all payment scenarios, but enables a new class of transaction that is effectively pay-per-request.
It's worth noting that this protocol is primarily supported by Coinbase today -- You'd be using USDC on the Base network (Layer 2 on top of Ethereum). However, the protocol itself is opening meaning anyone can self-host the same mechanics on any network, with any token/crypto asset.
I support one of the similar projects in my organisation and I can't wait for golive.
Want to read a paid message? Please upload your recent utility bill and confirm your identity with a video call. Sorry, you are not a US citizen with possession of the only subset of ID documents we support, reject.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on perspective), this is the law basically everywhere where people have money. Like, you can avoid KYC/AML checks by using small operators, but as they get larger they'll have to introduce them or be regulated out of existence.
If you really hate this (which is a valid position that I mostly don't share) then you should either run for elected office or sponsor/help other people to do this, as that's the only way to change the law.
Fundamentally, as the internet ends up mapping to just society, it will be a reflection of society, much of which is driven by government regulation.
And I'm not sure how you plan to get your crypto into fiat without hitting a bank/financial institution which will have these checks.
Like, this is part of society (for some good and some bad reasons, like a lot of other things).
I wish you the very best of luck in colonising mars, as this is basically the only way you'll avoid KYC/AML in the long-term.
More seriously, I'd probably start making provisions for taxation of your crypto as it would really suck to have that happen unexpectedly (and it will, as governments start forcing financial/crypto institutions to report to them).
> Money existed for like 4,000 years before KYC/AML, and the society was just fine in regards to money.
As an aside, money is relatively recent, debt is the thing that's existed for much longer. And unfortunately, society determines what is important, and apparently society (well actually the US government) has decided that KYC etc matters to society.
Not really.
As it is customary with financial law, it only exists to make hard working people suffer, while leaving all the ways for criminal enterprises to continue business. Being Ukrainian person I can tell you with confidence that legalizing personal 1000 USDT made on a freelance job is harder than laundering $1m made by corruption by government officials.
Also, KYC/AML is not binary, it's a scale. I have no problem KYCing at my local Polish bank and sending my crypto transactions to my bank account and they are fine with it as well as long as they know who I am.
> in the long-term.
True. Operating a legitimate (!) clear business, say, in Singapore remotely from Ukraine was a routine thing like ten years ago and became almost impossible in 2020s - specifically due to American regulatory pressure. Again, we're talking about lawful businesses. Criminal enterprises have no problems opening bank accounts anywhere they want.
> (well actually the US government) has decided that KYC etc matters to
...American political interests. KYC/AML is detrimental to economic growth and harmful to the society as been demonstrated time and again.
Can you give me some more details on this? My understanding was that only the sanctioned parts of Ukraine were impacted by recent changes, but perhaps I'm wrong.
First of all, banks couldn't care less about telling apart different species of Ukrainian people. Second, for any bank in the world it's a matter of cost of finmonitoring. And for each and every customer the cost of compliance is always higher than the profit from this person's transaction. Therefore, banks have strong incentive to refuse service for any person that is remotely unordinary. Hence "debanking": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debanking