Floating opposites are a poetic form of literary expression. They're used in speech-writing, wordsmith copy-writing, and often built into a good movie script if you pay close attention.
I like ironic opposites. Silly example: when you get to the end of the package of garbage bags and throw the box away in that remaining bag. Beautiful little symbolic loop of living irony all packed up in a tidy formula.
Speaking of waste, though, let's take a look at something the crypto world loves more than just about anything... not.
KYC means know your customer.
AML means Anti-Money-Laundering.
Then, there's SEC, CIA, FATF and FinCen and you can go figure the rest out... this ain't crypto 101 (well, actually I don't mind doing that too... just some other time).
Rules Rules Rules.
Sometimes it makes a freedom-loving person feel like a kid stuck in the last week of boring junior high classes and you know Summer is, like, 3 days away. Just let us out and go do what we're supposed to be doing when the nice weather hits, eh!?
Crypto people should be experiencing roughly the same emotions when we're hit more and more with the government agencies that care about us so much, that they want to do everything they possibly can to make the crypto world a safer place for all of us. Imagine that, they don't even know us, but they just care SO much, they want to know our names, addresses, phone numbers, add a Google Auth (scary how a new world of finance could all collapse in a heartbeat if Google wished it... or worse, just wasn't paying that much attention to how many millions of their users would lose access to their digital cash if for days if not worse...) govt. I.D., recent bill statement at address, and a live smart phone selfie holding up a written statement next to our mug shot. So, they essentially need a file of our retinal scan, our handwriting, and dox, and in trade for that we can enjoy the instantaneous anonymity and privacy of Bitcoin. Ridiculous!
This is not that post where I talk about how there really is eventually no way around this stuff, so we better find smarter solutions to getting THROUGH it instead of around. That one is for another day.
This post is about that irony, floating opposites that are so mind-numbingly stupid it's hard to believe they're real, so let's instead pretend they're beautiful. Knowing your customer... how many of you, when bumping up against this for the first time out of necessity on Binance, for example, felt like BINANCE knew you much better? How about when they were extorted by hackers and refused to comply, and the full identities of millions of users were posted to the net as a result? Did anyone ever even follow-up on any kind of sense of justice out of that situation? Binance used a 3rd party to collect and store all of that data. Did you know that? Do you know the name of that company? So, does Binance know you better?
No, but some strangers somewhere do.
Share the love.
Know your customer- the thing that regulators want in order to keep our identity safe. How much sense does that make, folks?
Now, honestly, I am used to the understanding that it tends to go hand in hand with any sort of serious finance. This isn't some 13 year old ranting about how THEY think the world should turn. Gordon's been around the block a few too many times. I know this is not new stuff, but for such a vast scape of the crypto world to still allow anonymity, and knowing that the governments of the world do not wish to continue allowing that, it is a relatively new thing to be the standard norm in crypto to require full dox that is literally handed over to strangers to verify.
The clash of floating opposites, for instance, between Monero and KYC. Imagine if at some near future, the only way to buy Monero is on a platform that requires KYC? Sure, if you get it off exchange into a private wallet, you now own a privacy coin, but any entities from which you wish to remain private, already know who you are and where you bought it, at what price and how much. At that stage, and here is the irony I love the most, once you go to USE the coins, perhaps from a KYC-free wallet while there is that sort of thing, honestly you probably don't care as much about someone knowing WHAT you purchase with it, if you ARE one of the regular vanilla good guys. So, if you bought some Monero for a future date when you want to exert your human-to-internet rights to download a cheap game from STEAM during a super saver sale (if they take crypto sometime soon... I dunno I never buy things from STEAM but I'm sure Half Life 2/E1/E2 has gotten at least 2 million downloads there... duy) you really just don't believe it is anyone's darn business where the Monero came from, and what you might plan to do with it. Right? But, for the dude trafficking humans cocaine and weapons, you'll never see where the Monero went once it's actually in use. Those guys didn't go through KYC. If they did, they used someone's identity they scammed off of Binance's 3rd party. KYC stops NOTHING bad from happening when it involves bad motives from bad folks.
The notion that more and more of society is falling for, which concerns me deeply, is the idea that "you won't mind if you don't have anything to hide". I get it. But, it SOOOO does not make it right. Personal rights that should travel freely with every human that walks the planet, except for those who have already handed over their rights due to their severe actions, should be that we all walk around with a sense of freedom, that they are not to have been presumed to need to PROVE that they aren't up to something wrong. I've been in crypto a few years and talked, or typed with dozens if not hundreds of people, and certainly read thousands of lines of topics in numerous forums, and I have only run across perhaps 2-3 people ever, in crypto, who's entire focus was on evading the government for nefarious reasons. One of them is famous, was in a Bitcoin documentary, and went to jail protecting dealers on silk road. He's back to crypto. The other is Roger Ver, who believes in an extreme form of libertarianism where everything should work itself out according to its own predefined rules, including leaving all illegal activities and substances be. Let people work it all out themselves. I'm simplifying, because the point I wish to make is that almost everyone in crypto just wants to actually get a chance to make terrible decisions in trying to 100X some crappy coin before the owners run off with a pump and dump. Okay, maybe it's a little better than that- lol. We want a chance to decide where we'd like to send a few bucks other than the bank, and see if we can earn a profit before the government props their hands out asking for their piece.
And, then there's AML, the anti-money laundering aspect of things. Pardon me, but if the vast majority of crypto use is for nefarious money-cleansing routines, then sorry but what is the stonk market? Churning packages of stocks, bonds, dividends in with junk mortgages and DOA balloon payments to launder the worst deals ever made on Wall Street is hardly a legal flow of funds for unaware investors, but the SEC has literally sat by and watched this happen for the past 20 years and 2008 didn't change a single thing about it. Looped corruption gets me ballistically angry, because it is the opposite of a poetic floating opposite; it's just so very much on the wrong side of wrong that it cannot even justify the kinds of actions these entities claim to protect or enforce. The SEC, who waited until XRP started to moon, to announce they wanted to shut them down, is a pre-meditated market price manipulator of the largest kind. The SEC, who just went after the same thing for LBRY, is a predatory agency that has done nothing for the actual exit scams and terminal ICO's that they SHOULD be hunting down. I am not standing in defense of XRP OR LBRY. I really don't care, but regarding the ideals, I certainly do care.
When is the last time that YOU felt directly threatened by a money launderer? When was the last time that you went to dollar cost average on Voyager or Coinbase, and you wondered if a wild-eyed extortionist was going to come swooping in and steal your coins and all because the 3rd party handler didn't collect their dox data? But, they sure have your data on file, right? Let's face it, criminals looking to do harm to others, do so by phishing for the very data the government wants on file. If we aren't providing millions of data points to be stored on file in who knows what country, on who knows which servers, there would be little for the evil elements to steal, in order to fake accounts and launder that money. It makes it very easy for data thieves to steal, when the innocent are forced to place that data at risk. It's just plain stupid! Except... it's not. It is exactly the reason it is happening.
The government's version of crypto is the ultimate floating opposite; where you see convenience, ending 3rd party involvement, decentralization, open ledgers, they see surveillance, corporate partnerships for taking your data and creating a dossier on your spending habits, taxes owed etc. They see an opportunity to control and to surveil, and there seems to be little to be done about it.
I am not to the extreme on these principles. I'm not really even a libertarian. I agree with many of their ideals, but I also believe in good rules and following those rules. I dislike hypocrisy by those who wish to enforce those rules, however, and I resent the notion that we have simply taken assumption that they can define the fate of the future of finance, much in the beautiful irony of the freedoms crypto was designed to uphold, we now find it very difficult to move smart money around, without it leaving a trace of everything we felt the right to simply say "none of your darn business" to.
We live in a world where our perception is using platforms for free, and in trade we give a little of ourselves. In reality, we simply hand over billions of dollars of data to crap platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and now we're essentially giving away the rest for the right to trade crypto.
I wonder, has anyone honestly ever said to themselves, that they feel more secure that their KYC data was on file somewhere, because they know the honest and well organized entities that make up government agencies will be able to manage the digital age so much more efficiently as a result? Please, tell me, if there are people in crypto who believe that, can we make a new rule that they are not allowed to do anything with money in any form? A certain level of innocence is welcome in this world, but an ignorant level of naivety is just plain dangerous in crypto.
So, to be very blunt and honest, if there WAS a system in place to better protect all of our private information and keep it from leaking to the internet, and that did not involve ingesting some form of code tracking, tattoos or linking one's self to their smart phones or facial recognition, I would not have a problem proving I am who I say, so a platform can be legally in bounds to allow my account to dump large sums to and from crypto. I actually DO get the point. But, that level of respect and comfort is something that must be earned, and pardon me if I know for a fact I speak for the majority, when I say we have no reason to trust those who want KYC everywhere, and use AML as the excuse. It is silly, ludicrous, and none of us are being fooled by it. I DO believe in compliance and enforcement to protect the innocent, but I do NOT believe in utilizing the mechanism of the innocent quite literally against themselves, in the name of catching a few bad seeds.
A note to the governments of the world:
Real surveillance, issuing warrants and getting clever computer nerds to do their job is how you guys will catch the bad players in this mess. Don't use our anonymity to do your job. Just, learn to do it better.
And for that rant and all others likely to follow, Crypto Gordon Freeman very happily proud to say goodbye for now... and I am... out.
