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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.

The amount of money you can load or receive into a debit card is limited without doing enough KYC overhead you could have gotten a bank account with the same effort.

If you try automating bots to do KYC for debit cards what you'll be doing is basically looking like a money launderer and get all your accounts shut down.

This is highly country dependent. Anonymous prepaid cards aren't as widely available as you might think, and often they have very high user-paid fees.

Maybe it’s just my lack of imagination, but I don’t see a use case for giving agents money when they can barely be trusted to not break out of a sandbox and cause hallucinatory chaos.

Let’s say for a minute this is a failure of my imagination. Does each sub agent really need to be able to independently transact?

I could see a future in which ad-funded web sites charge agents some tiny amount per request instead of outright blocking non-human visitors.

Besides, you're already effectively giving agents money (tokens aren't free, and agents decide when to stop consuming new ones), this is just more explicit :)

Why not have sub agents talk to a payment service? Sub agents should ultimately be associated with a human or business entity, the human or business entity could provide a single payment service for agents.

Which reloadable debit cards have no KYC requirements?

Do you want each sub agent to be able to anonymously transact?

KYC is probably particularly important in this space and it should be easily traceable to a human.

I used to work in fintech (back when Glass Steagall was a thing people cared about), and I am sort of perturbed by modern KYC requirements. Do they make sense for large transactions? Could be, not that any of that stops fraud from corporations or firms committing it; it just hides the fraud and places the onus on those less able to hide their funds in offshore locations or convertible currencies (like crypto) and metals (not that the average American would have much of that).

Do we need KYC for reloadable cards under a certain dollar amount though? I don't think so. We need a new tier of regulation to account for the fact that a lot of online transactions occur which do not fit a 'gift card' model but do not feel as comfortable with a 'forever identity' attached (for instance music subscriptions, recurring application payments, perhaps donations). A prepaid debit card with a limit of $500 or $1000, maybe, that anyone can get, like the old GreenDot cards but with a lower threshold and the ability to set a pin.

Basically as much as someone might carry around in cash, or a week or so of what someone might make at a 'not high wage' job.

Not everyone wants a bank account, or an account at a place that is not a bank account, and often people with those want an alternative to just cash.

We should not be so willing to sacrifice our possible pseudoanonymity; have we learned nothing from ad serving?

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