Why Aren't We Talking More About GPT-4.1? (blog.kilocode.ai)
2 points by owendarko 5m ago 2 comments
The Ukraine War and the Kill Market (250bpm.substack.com)
1 points by WillDaSilva 43m ago 1 comments
EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027
69 alexey-salmin 94 5/5/2025, 8:28:40 AM cointelegraph.com ↗
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).
The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.
[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]
Global KYC provider couldn't possibly know. To get paid, they need to serve the majority of customers, not all of them.
A fast, cheap, global, and private currency; in contrast to the speculative asset that is Bitcoin.
So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".
The lowest daily average cost per transaction in the last month was $0.81, and the highest was $2.52.
And what's worse is that it's impossible to reliably predict the correct fee to be able to get into the next block.
This means that at any time if you're unlucky your payment might get stuck for hours, days or even weeks.
The fast-cheap-private part may or may not be fixed at some point, especially the fast-cheap, or other currencies may help with it.
The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC.
What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great:
https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-price-million-cia...
By the way, the article itself claims:
"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."
This statement is walked back later.
It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
The idea is that "lawful limits", even if you wholeheartedly support them now, can change at a whim if a new government is elected or a war starts or some other major crisis happens. These things come and go every few decades, one is not improbable to occur within the frame of your lifetime and place of residence.
They don't ban the coins and their private usages, they ban them on exchanges.
People will just (legally) use decentalised exchanges to convert between monero and bitcoin so it won't have much impact
Haveno already works by providing p2p multisignature escrow. With this design, you need to match with an individual and do a direct exchange. There is a Tor-based application
BasicSwap has another model with noncustodial atomic swaps and some sort of decentralised orderbook.
I expect that Serai will be much more effective than those. It will launch soon with a liquidity pool design, similar to Uniswap for Ethereum. With this model, other people can profit by providing liquidity for pools. It will be very easy for anyone to initiate a trade and do an exchange for a different currency from the pool. It will be incorporated into the most popular mobile app Cakewallet, so it should be accessible even for non-technical users and quickly gain adoption. I think this has the potential to provide an even more convenient, generally superior experience compared to centralised exchanges.
In the end you'll be able to exchange coins for other coins but by itself it's meaningless.
This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.
People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.
The big problem seems to be that then you allow for arbitrary speculation, causing high volatility, and scarcity of reliable ways to exchange the money, because no organisation that could otherwise stabilise the exchange rate can put their name to fully private transactions.
And you can still do this, the AML is related to the using the Exchanges themselves ?
Cash too is becoming more and more restricted over time. Large denominations are removed from circulation, transactions above certain threshold are made illegal, limits are put on cash withdrawals per day and per month.
Realistically the current trajectory of the EU is "less and less private transactions until there are none in a couple of decades".
If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.
If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
No, we don't have any of that here.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
ROFL! Are you suggesting there is no framework? Do the basic research before spouting your propaganda!
There's your framework:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/infographic/legislative-proce...
And there are directives, that leave a lot of room how to the EU countries on how to implement them.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.