Yeah. They seem to work for me, too. There was a few weeks where one of my devices got trapped in the loop gp described and it was very frustrating. I am not using Cloudflare DNS.
There is a feud between CloudFlare and the person/people running Archive.is/ph, where they blame each other for X, and people using CloudFlare's DNS gets sent into some redirect loop or something when they try to access the website.
The law says the bank must give them their money. But banks are above the law. I know when PaPal codes and account, PayPal usually steals the money. Most traditional banks eventually give you your money if you hire a lawyer, that is, they give the money to the lawyer who keeps it.
How do you know Paypal usually keeps the money, is there a public accounting of this situation? Would be interesting to analyze - please share any info you have on the data.
PayPal's EULA has a "liquidated damages clause", which means that if they think you lost them money and damaged them, instead of having to go to a court, they just charge you what they think the damages are.
Sounds like a strong danger of applying a modern form of red lining & financial deplatforming. If you’re a higher risk, of course any financial products that you can access will cost more in fees and interest. Who is considered a higher risk by the impersonal algorithms and bank systems being applied?
Banking is optional; the problem is that many businesses insist on bank cards to transact. It’s important that businesses be compelled to accept cash for all transactions.
It’s particularly bad in some cities. Rather than enforcing access to the special hell that is US retail banking, just prohibit businesses from ripping out their existing cash infrastructure.
Even with a bank account, your ability to transact is subject to surveillance and seizure/freezing without evidence or probable cause. Cash has none of these problems.
Good luck with that. There are multiple reasons cops use to do a search if they want to. Probable cause can range from seeing something sticking out from under your seat, speeding, suspicion of being under influence, or being in proximity of another crime. Pair that with the incentive of civil forfeiture profits and it’s not looking like a good idea to travel with 25k
I am convinced that if the American police forces wish to detain, arrest, or take your money, they will find a reason to do so, or create one where none was there before. Assets forfeiture, detainment, and arrest without legitimate judicial reason is deeply unfair. Regardless of innocence that may be found and adjudicated later, the damage to ones reputation, employment, and even banking can be disastrous. Recourse is often costly or non-existent.
They will then bring in a drug sniffing dog they've trained to notify the police officer of a presence of drugs on command, and voila, there's reasonable grounds to search your vehicle.
"One of my in-laws was EOD in the US Army, and has rode in this vehicle. You need to find a dog that will not signal on explosives of any kind. Furthermore, the clock on this stop, per <supreme court decision about unreasonable roadside detention>, is starting to run a bit long. Here is my attorney's card."
The one time I was asked to be searched while driving I declined. They immediately called a drug dog, yanked its leash, and called it a drug hit. I then hung out for an hour while they confirmed I was a poor college student with zero drugs.
Driving with any amount of cash above a few hundred will get you robbed by the police in asset forfeiture. It happens everyday around the country to small business owners that deal with a lot of cash.
I cannot get paid by my company without a bank account. No company would pay me my salary in cash. A bank account is no longer optional if you want to live a normal life.
If they issue you a check you can take it to the banking institution listed on the check and they will honor it. The downside is, now you’re dealing with cash (and some companies went DD only a long time ago).
Most banks (in the US) will charge the presenter a fee to cash a check drawn on an account they service. [1]
It's reasonable to demand that your employer make your whole pay (less withholdings) available to you, and if you are unable to maintain a bank account, and their bank charges a fee to honor checks, that's not really reasonable if you are paid by check.
New Zealand doesn't have cheques any more. Banks here totally phased them out a couple of years back.
The USA will also make checks obsolete over time.
Plus cash is disliked at many retailers and cash is not acceptable at some locations (e.g. my skifield only accepts cards - I was told it is because the nearest small-town bank won't accept cash deposits from the skifield). I suspect our government will slowly discourage cash 1. to prevent tax evasion (cash jobs), and 2. to prevent illegal purchases (e.g. weed). Those are the main uses for cash that I personally see others use cash for (I use cash because I like using it and I like privacy).
I wouldn’t necessarily expect us to follow New Zealand’s example. We’ve accumulated a lot of methods for exchanging money without really discarding any in particular.
New Zealand is a small country way out in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean 2.5K miles (or over 4K kilometers) away from its nearest neighbor and with a population smaller than NYC. The United States is 50 stubborn ass States plus the Fed’s occupation in southern Maryland. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has an address in Wellington, is owned by the New Zealand government and answerable to Parliament. The Federal Reserve system isn’t even a single bank with a single board of directors, isn’t wholly owned by the US Government and isn’t directly answerable to Congress.
There’s no easy way to make a lazy comparison between us and have it be convincing. Parts of the Federal Government would likely love to see the United States become a cashless society but they don’t always get what they want.
Australia has a population bigger than NYC and "Australia is set to be a cheque-less society by the end of the decade, if the federal government has its way."
Zealand has a population and land area similar to Oregon. Might as well say NZ has a much bigger population than Wyoming - NYC is irrelevant.
Cheques have slowly disappeared because of economic reasons: the transaction costs/risks involved, and because electronic transfers have benefits. The economic forces are likely similar in the states. I believe the change has little to do with the NZ government nor the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
Kinda missing the forest for the trees here. What I’m driving at is that New Zealand and the United States are not easily comparable and just because New Zealand is doing a thing it does not follow that the United States also shall successfully pursue and accomplish the same policy objectives. Even a straight comparison between Australia and New Zealand is difficult and both their system of government and their banking system are closer in form with each other than with the United States, and there's a lot fewer people in a lot fewer places to just straight up disagree and subvert the efforts and policy objectives of the Federal Government, no matter what they may be. If a Presidential candidate ever did make it a platform issue, you could probably expect his opponents to take the opposite approach.
What the United States lacks is the kind of central control that a Westminster-style of government can exercise, even over cash money and checks, and there are a lot more institutions with some say over the continued prevalence of cash so even as its usage declines it is unlikely to completely disappear even in our lifetimes. Even if Chase stops giving their customers checkbooks, it doesn’t mean M&T will, and even if M&T does, it doesn’t mean there won’t be a bank that makes it a point to offer free checkbooks as a value add to small business owners that want to continue issuing paper checks to their employees. The form money takes here tends to be additive, and it is rare for a system to ever completely disappear. I mean next on the chopping block is probably Zelle followed by ACH of all things now that we have FedNow, and even that’s not necessarily going to happen.
You seem to think that government or federal control is required to phase out cheques. Maybe some legislative roadblocks needed removal (e.g. removing laws forcing companies or departments to accept cheques?).
AFAIK it was economic and convenience forces that caused the disappearance of cheques over a couple of decades. Banks discouraged chequebooks by making the accounts and books expensive. Retailers at most risk of receiving bad cheques started not accepting cheques (e.g. gas stations). Handling fees for cheques. Chequebooks not available to people with credit risk. Businesses stopped paying using cheques - instead they needed a bank account. New Zealanders got more familiar with cards and direct debits, so fewer New Zealanders (individuals and businesses) used cheques.
AFAIK it wasn't a top-down activity in New Zealand. Australia's move seems to be more government based but I would guess Oz is part way down the tracks of discouraging cheques.
The last time I remember handling a cheque in NZ was back in the 2000's (dividend payment). I remember thinking cheques were quaint when I worked in the US in the 90's: we have been slowly discouraging them in NZ for decades.
It is just like how we are not paid in cash at the end of the week no more - systemic change happens slowly.
A company may 'want' to hire you, but most companies also want their employees to be at least somewhat fungible. If you're too difficult to hire, they will look again.
I'm not sure I would agree that banking is optional in today's society.
Canada has laws[1] intended to ensure access to banking, with $10M fines for violations. Not familiar with them myself and wondering how effective they are, and whether anyone has sued and won. It's maybe a bit ironic considering how the government here improperly locked a lot of people out of their funds during the trucker protests (the inquiry found collateral damage where people completely uninvolved were affected).
Canada does the same thing with shutting down bank accounts based on "suspicious transactions" and then turning around and saying "we can't tell you why".
Pretty sure it's a global agreement around terrorist funding.
Banking is not optional in today's advanced societies, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we'll have proper regulations mandating a minimum level of banking service, eg. Limited deposits, withdrawals, debit/secured cards.
Solution, bring back post office banking or banking through the social security admin. Turn 18 you get a banking and benefits card. Do that and most people won't ever have to do business with a private bank, ever.
Millions of people live normal lives without bank accounts.
The solution to the problem is not to force retail banks to extend their terrible customer service to all of society, it’s to ensure the utility of cash. Cash works great even if the banks (or the state) hate you.
This depends highly on the country. Cash doesn't work so great in most of the EU anymore. In Spain and Greece for example, it's illegal to buy anything with more than 500 euro cash I believe.
I believe it's optional for you, but not for the great majority of people. Lack of access to banking services specifically holds back a lot of people (look up 'unbanked').
Banking is definitely not optional. Certain transactions, specially those done online, require digital payments that cannot be done with physical cash. It's increasingly a required part that's needed if you want to participate in modern society, and the lack of access to such banking systems forces people to adopt subpar services as a replacement.
In the ideal case, banking should be a utility like power & water: A necessity for modern life, without which certain daily routines would not be possible.
You can walk into any USPS office and buy up to $1000 in money orders anonymously. What prevents them from selling anonymous prepaid cards the same way?
it's almost as if power doesn't want to do things democratically. who cares if it's the government with it's boot on my neck, or a corporation with a boot on my neck, either way, I'm getting trod on!
I think there's a recent and ongoing bipartisan bill in the US trying to fix some of the worst aspect of civil asset forfeiture.
With some luck ten years from now there may be a bill in the US trying to fix some of the worst aspect of KYC/AML (like regular people getting their bank accounts closed for no reason and without any explanation).
> A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied. He was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents – and the only black person on his portion of the train
Never answer with any info, never consent to searches.
At minimum, there needs to be a law that requires banks to identify to the customer the specific transactions that led to the closing of the account. And if there’s no prosecution related to these transactions after a year, the ban gets lifted.
Innocent until proven guilty, not guilt until proven innocent.
Being de-platformed from financial infrastructure is tantamount to being economically jailed and instantly forced into life altering poverty. This isn’t some silly app you’re getting banned from…
Banks shouldn’t be allowed to ban anyone. They should need a court order to lock up/ban someone from access/mobility of their own property.
That said, this is likely a narrow lens statement. The problem is more complex around governments/judicial systems incentivizing banks to behave like governments. In reality, our regulatory agencies need to do their jobs: regulate/enforce and be held accountable when they don’t (instead of passing that enforcement on to banks through threat of liability).
The government is the prime culprit when it comes to financially de-platforming people, if you want more secure access to banking, the solution is lighter regulation of banks, not more. Anti-money-laundering (AML) and so-called risk management regulations make it unprofitable and complicated to provided a mount services to many people. The government (and its regulatory bodies) use this ‘flexibility’ to achieve their aims (see operation Choke Point).
I’d say “better regulation” rather than “less” - things like fraud and money laundering are important to fight (consider how bad ransomware would be if the attackers didn’t have to convince their victims to make a cryptocurrency transaction first) but we sacrificed due process to get there. It shouldn’t be impossible to have better regulations but the national security ratchet effect is pretty strong, as I’m reminded every time the TSA scrutinizes my sandals.
You assume that the point of regulation is the stated one. I do not think this is a valid assumption. Regulatory capture has occurred consistently throughout US history as has bribery, collusion, and monopoly building (with explicit government support). What makes you believe that regulation would then be helpful in some area when it hasn’t elsewhere?
> The government is the prime culprit when it comes to financially de-platforming people, if you want more secure access to banking, the solution is lighter regulation of banks, not more.
Banks are creatures of government, they're never going to be private competitive businesses. The solution is to recognise this and subject them to the same oversight that government is: FOIA, the equal protection clause, all of that good stuff.
One could argue that mortgages given out sub 2.5% became a problem when the fed funds rate went to 2.5% by mid-June. Additionally, a US deregulation wouldn’t explain house bubbles elsewhere at the same time. The truth is that when interest rates are low, debt is more attractive but when/if rates rise, many borrowers and lenders will suffer. This became especially problematic when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to compete very strongly with government money and gain massive swaths of the market. The other lenders were then pushed into rather unsafe behavior. Thing is, how do you regulate subprime lending? If the answer is just to refuse the “dirty poors” you’ll eventually have an extremely angry and desperate underclass, hence the creation of Fannie and Freddie in the first place. If you outlaw derivative markets you’ll be outlawing an avenue for legitimate hedging, and you’d end up with even greater consolidation of many markets into the hands of even fewer participants. While deregulation did directly lead to the consolidation of the banking system after the crisis, and certainly didn’t help prevent the crisis, I wouldn’t consider it a primary cause.
This gets pretty tricky - telling a bank they need to keep dealing with customers that cost them tons of money and are actively trying to defraud them (and other customers) seems awfully harsh.
I think the government should provide a basic bank account to anyone who wants one though.
Postal banking could be an option, but otherwise, the federal government seems to not want to deal with the customer service involved in running a banking operation.
It would probably be more reasonable to make some sort of tightly regulated basic bank account that banks would be required to offer in some situations.
Nobody would be happy, but hold all deposits for a long period, so that they fully clear. Possibly restrict the sources of funds; maybe a basic bank account can only accept payroll and government deposits, maybe a limit of N unique payers per unit time. Etc. Social security and state benefit programs have specialized accounts for people without other bank accounts, because it works better than sending checks in the mail, maybe one of those programs could be slightly more generalized.
Allow a bank to refuse to service an otherwise qualifying basic banking customer only if the bank goes through a court process and/or is accompanied by actual criminal charges filed.
>>>It would probably be more reasonable to make some sort of tightly regulated basic bank account that banks would be required to offer in some situations.
Yeah, I'd be ok with this. Require banks to provide some MVP 'bank account' to anyone that isn't already declared banking-persona-non-grata by the courts.
> telling a bank they need to keep dealing with customers that cost them tons of money and are actively trying to defraud them (and other customers) seems awfully harsh.
So, the legal system? The only reason regulated banks should be able to deplatform someone is if they also have a legally actionable case, and they do legally action it, and the person is found guilty.
Ok; can we do the same to your industry? Would you enjoy being required to serve incredibly unprofitable customers until you can (very expensively!) take them to court?
If being banked is so critical (and it is, in modern society) then it shouldn't be handled solely by private enterprise. Government needs to step in and offer basic services.
Banking is, in the United States, by only the dictionary definition a private industry, and their importance and potential negative impact to the daily life of the average citizen puts them in the same category as utility providers and healthcare.
Strawman all you want, but there's a big difference between social media and finance.
Banks are a special case. If you are going to apply the “they are just a regular business like my local bar” to them by logical extension any business should be able to create new money and transmit it. Nothing special eh!
Banks have special rules because they are infrastructure. A cafe needs a bank but not vice versa.
Yes, it would be good if we deregulated, so that banking wasn't special.
Private companies should be allowed to print private notes. (Of course, with distinctive designs etc. We don't want anyone fooled into mixing them up.)
This would be a more “old fashioned” monetary system. Problem is people getting ripped off or rugpulled. Especially as there is no gold standard so you would presumably back these by some asset for example this note is worth 1% of our fleet cars or something.
> Especially as there is no gold standard so you would presumably back these by some asset for example this note is worth 1% of our fleet cars or something.
I would expect private issuers in eg the US to denominate their notes in USD. Or if USD were to abolished tomorrow, they would probably denominate in Euro. Failing that, I would expect a return to denomination in gold before denomination in car fleets.
Backing is a different issue. Walmart could denominate their notes in gold, but back them with the strength of their overall balance sheet and operations. Just like banks today denominate the contents of your bank account in USD, but back them with their balance sheets. (And have only a small fraction of their assets in USD reserves at the Fed or vault cash.)
> Problem is people getting ripped off or rugpulled.
Stocks are (in practice, effectively) denominated as fractions of company.
What I am describing is closer to bonds. They are denominated in currency, but still backed by the value of the company.
Bonds (or something equivalent to bonds) are used all the time to pay people. Eg someone who gets paid at the end of the month accrues something like a bond throughout the month. The company owes her more and more of something denominated in currency, not in stocks. At the end of the month, the company redeems that IOU by transferring currency.
Paying people in stocks is much rarer.
Importantly, the base pay of most people from one month to the next is fixed in terms of currency, not in terms of a specific number of stocks.
I agree, banks should have rules and regulations specific to their industry, just like cafes should industry-specific rules (food handling, tip distribution, etc.).
I don't think "you can't fire a customer" is a good one though.
There's also a distinction between not being able to use a particular bank and not being able to use any bank. It's important that everyone be able to use some bank, but not that everyone can use Chase, but it's tough to regulate that. Again, this is why I see a government option as necessary.
The main issue isn't firing a customer (although it's bad), but locking up their money. It's not like they say "hey, we want to stop doing business with you, please transfer all your money to some other bank within a week or take out your money at the nearest branch", or do they?
Locking up the money is basically theft, but I'm sure the law and regulations say otherwise.
If that would be the case, won't there then be the risk of creating a short-circuit which would benefit the actual money launderers/criminals?
Say, I have 3 millions somehow deposited in the $bank_where_i_put_my_shady_money, I want to take/move the money, but doing so will raise some eyebrows, so I deliberately try to debank myself so that I can get all my money cash OR move it to $partner_bank
In the USA, all of the large banks are part of the Federal Reserve System and the FFIC insures all accounts up to a certain amount. I would say this nullifies their claim to refuse the public as a largely publicly funded institution… the government, however, doesn’t care about the hoi polloi so this situation isn’t likely to ever change.
Or you need better digital ID systems to reduce risk of fraud?
Example: In the EU all internet transactions require a second factor, it's annoying -- but typing in a credit card number is already crappy UX.
But making identify theft harder could also reduce risk of keeping clients with abnormal patterns. Since the bank will have more confidence that the customer isn't subject to identity theft.
Obviously, there are more options. Maybe, banks should be held more accountable.
But increasing the bar for fraud by having a strong online identity system could probably raise the bar a lot.
The law says the opposite, in fact. If a bank teller reveals to you that you are the subject of an SAR, it could have sever consequences to them, so they're very disincentivized to reveal that there's even been a suspicious transaction, never mind which one it was.
> At minimum, there needs to be a law that requires banks to identify to the customer the specific transactions that led to the closing of the account.
That presumes (and requires) a very specific risk model by the banks.
Eventually more and more use cases for Bitcoin will emerge, as the government becomes less competent and more reckless with its fiat. It costs $35,000 for a reason.
We just discussed this on the occasion of SBF being convicted as a fraudster: all crypto is a scam. Them being negative sum games makes them so. Whether the scam is a ponzi, a pyramid scheme or something novel is a matter of debate. That it's a scam is not in debate, that's a plain mathematical fact.
Fine, I clicked and read a couple of those. I like the 3rd one that defines a ponzi scheme:
"A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features:
1 People invest into it because they expect good profits, and
2. that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,
3. there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,
4. the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while
5. the operators take away a large portion of this money."
This is great because points 3 and 5 are trivially proved false for Bitcoin and shows that is no more a ponzi scheme than stocks or real estate or any other common investment.
UPDATE: you also have to love this amazing piece of either ignorance or straight up lying in the later part of the article:
"By that definition the USD is a ponzi. No, national currencies too fail to fit the definition, because people do not 'invest' in them with the expectation of gain..."
In the article the author claims stocks have an "external" pay off because stock is tied to a company that sells products and if the company does well they might pay shareholders dividends or do a stock buyback. I can accept that a dividend is an "external" source of income, but those are not guaranteed in the stock market by any means. Most people buy stock in hopes that the price will rise due to simple supply and demand (a company buyback is just more demand). If that counts as external then Bitcoin should be covered too, especially since the overall supply of Bitcoin is guaranteed not to rise over a set amount. That's not the case with any other investment in the world (except maybe real estate, depending on how you look at it)
Bitcoin miners do collect rewards and fees (but not "gas" because that's an ethereum thing not a Bitcoin thing) and Miners are a key part of the operation of Bitcoin, but they are not "the operators" of Bitcoin in the same sense that Bernie Madoff was the operator of his fund. Anyone who wants to can become a miner, no permission necessary. Miners do not actively direct the activity of Bitcoin, they cannot change the rules (especially about how much revenue they collect), allow or disallow certain people from participating (and stay profitable), or anything like that.
There are other cryptocurrencies (most of them actually) where the developers of the currency act a lot more like Bernie Madoff type operators. They own a vast majority of the tokens and the source code that runs the network and they make executive decisions about operations, supply of tokens, protocol (code) changes, etc. That is why those of us who have been around a while point out that Bitcoin is the only one that is not a scam.
> This is great because points 3 and 5 are trivially proved false for Bitcoin
#3 is trivially proven true. If there were no transaction fees and you rolled back all Bitcoin transactions ever made , you would end up with a zero. This is in stark contrast to a stock where you'd end up with the dividends.
#5 is perhaps better put as "operators take away some portion of this money" and that's what transaction fees are. Calling it large indeed weakens the argument -- but doesn't prove it false.
We as in "Socialist Party of America"? I did not have a chance to contribute to this "discussion". What happens when this unbanking is practiced en-masse or when the US defaults on its foreign debt, with USD failing as the global reserve currency? The second one is imminent, and not only in my opinion.
That second one had better happen before 2030, because after that the US and one south american country being the only nations with net positive birth rates - and therefore populations that aren't aging out of productive work - coupled with the fact that it will take the rest of the world a couple of centuries to catch up to our military, means that the U.S. just needs to not be stupid for another 6 years or so.
So really, it probably is imminent; what with fighting 2 (and maybe up to 5 or 6) proxy wars and letting corporations continue to erode the tax law and environment to the detriment of the average taxpayer.
I was told the US was the greatest country in the history of countries and i should be proud i was accidentally born here...
That net positive birth rate will mostly come from the part of the population that is hardly capable of modern competitive productive work. They will be increasingly appeased with hand-outs, in the form of basic income, welfare and especially of make-work, which will put further pressure on the US dollar.
Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue.
Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to.
> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves.
> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.
Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else.
Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes.
The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by anyone from anyone willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute.
The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now.
EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will...
You started off so well, then got into crypto gobbledegook. Ethereum or anything built on it will never compete with AWS. That is just so completely hilarious. Also very off topic from the discussion here about people being unfairly unbanked.
The regulator didn't go through Nigel's case at all, as 'it is understood that the data does not cover his case, given that the bank never followed through with the closure' [1]. What FCA found that banks never debanked people based primarily on political beliefs[1]. However, Banks can use political beliefs secondarily to debank, and that's what Natwest did. Nagel sought documents from Natwest using Subject Access Request, there it is "found that an internal committee had deemed his views did not align with the bank's own. This formed part of the basis for cutting him, the document showed, alongside commercial considerations." [2]
It's interesting, it really isn't totalitarianism, actually the opposite, in a way that 20th C writers were simply not able to imagine. There is no centralization/dictatorial dynamic for this in the US, at all. It is all decentralized, at best these outcomes fall into the "unintended consequences of regulation" category, which is rather well studied, but in a much more simplified world model than we face today.
> If the bank has filed a SAR, it isn’t legally allowed to tell you, and the federal government prosecutes only a small fraction of the people whom the banks document in their SARs.
Sounds worryingly similar to an effective violation of habeas corpus ?
P.S.: To make the matters worse, it looks that trying to rely more on cash as an insurance against getting debanked, raises your risk of getting debanked !
that's not totalitarianism. it's a shitty system with a ridiculously bad trade off (catching some money launderers versus fucking innocent customers)
the problem is that banks can't handle this requirement well. if they think something is suspicious, sure file the SAR/CTR, and then if they think there's a need for KYC, tell the customer that. the customer provides information about the transaction, the bank then can chill the fuck out. if this keeps going on they can eventually tell the customer that okay, it's too much work for them, please close the account in 1 month.
but no, they immediately switch into this crusader mode, because it's just easier for them, and customers have no recourse.
>There is no centralization/dictatorial dynamic for this in the US, at all.
You are incredibly incorrect on that assertion. There is, in fact, a centralization/dictatorial dynamic at play, and it's called the Bank Secrecy Act.
Now it doesn't read like it, which most acts of american legislature don't, but on further observation of what it actually does, the intent becomes clear. There is one financial system in the U.S., you will play by it's rules or be excluded, it won't tell you why, it will not be a dumb pipe either. It is directly coupled to law enforcement, and the Federal Government, and yes, there is a Master list that if you get on it, will lock you out of withdrawing from (but not depositing into!) every U.S. bank.
Part of why I no longer do finance work. Once you see how the sausage is made, there is no shower hot enough to slough off the slimey feeling.
The most tragic thing about this is that most of the legislators are exactly the same. There's no problem until it happens to them. It's acceptable for "others" to be thought of as drug dealers and other miscreants who don't deserve to have bank accounts.
Reminds me of that D.A. that walked into a bank during the covid masking era and ruminated that they'd locked up people for less. I'm unsure if they changed their tactics or whatever because of this.
Most people are totalitarian in a few ways. Some people hate drugs. Everyone hates crime. The homeless cause social issues. Some people want their religion enforced. Some people hate foreigners.
Most people grant these powers to the government hoping to get their pet peeve taken care of, and are surprised when the government not only doesn't do what they promised, but turn those powers onto its own favorite victims instead.
Totalitarianism means the state has total authority. There’s no such thing as à la carte totalitarianism. How we deal with crime, drugs, religion, homelessness, and assimilation falls under social contract theory.
I have a crazy idea that might just work. What if we could create something that has the privacy of cash, is uncensorable like cash but could also be digitally transmitted like electronic payments?
Bitcoin, not crypto. And poster has to be cryptic and/or sarcastic because even though it's a solution to this very problem staring us in the face, people here shut down any intelligent conversation about it both with down votes and tired, long winded, oft repeated, uninformed arguments against it. It's pretty discouraging, honestly
Bitcoin absolutely does not have the privacy of cash!
It is cash like in that if you typo the destination address you instantly lose all the money, which is sort of like how you can accidentally set cash on fire.
All Bitcoins are trackable on the blockchain, and these days you won't go far before transactions can be connected to an identifiable wallet.
If you've ever said anything like "Donations accepted at $ADDRESS", then everyone can see if anyone ever sent anything, and from there it doesn't take much work to see if you ever spent that money on anything and what else you do with it.
You can obscure things some, but the records are permanent and anything people can figure out stays known. If the authorities are after you, then they can get information from exchanges, which at this point require giving them personal information.
Cash is much more private. It takes much more effort to figure out who you gave your cash to.
This is also transitive: if I get bitcoin from you and two weeks from now the cops show up at my door asking to know why I had a funds related to some crime, I have to convince them that I had no knowledge of the transaction a couple of steps back and even if I do I might find that vendors stop accepting anything in that chain or start buying insurance to protect them. That’s going to sour people on the experience real quickly.
Variations of that show up everywhere: your employer can review your political donations or decide you spend too much money at the local bar, casino, or anywhere else they don’t approve of.
It isn't hard to accept money on an address that is known to be associated with you and then transfer it to an address that is not known (cannot be proven) to be associated with you. An extreme form of this is called coin mixing or coin joining, but for most of us, I would think, that level of address obfuscation will not ever be necessary. Or if it is then you can imagine it will be automated.
Think about what that means: people are expected to maintain multiple accounts, pay people to launder money between accounts, and never make a mistake, or fail to predict what financial activity today will become a problem later (did you donate to Planned Parenthood when Roe was the law of the land? Better figure out how to remove that from the blockchain before your employer transfers your job out of a free state. Oh, wait, it’s not possible - better just hope nobody ever thinks to look!).
Major criminals get caught making mistakes on that kind of thing, there’s no way normal people aren’t going to make mistakes – and that’s before you think about what using a mixer actually means: lighting a neon sign saying “something about this transaction is dodgy, examine it!”
You are overstating how easy it is to track and how hard it is manage multiple addresses. As more addresses are used it gets harder and harder to track. Your employer will not have the resources to do it. Hierarchical wallets make it really easy to use and keep track of multiple addresses today, and more privacy schemes are in progress, see: https://river.com/learn/what-are-schnorr-signatures/
It's true that it is not completely anonymous, but it is a huge improvement over the current system we are discussing here. Add that to the other benefits Bitcoin has and I still feel like it's a huge win.
Here's also a flip side benefit to the public ledger. Businesses can, if they choose, cryptographically prove that they have the funds they say they have. Think of the value of that
> As more addresses are used it gets harder and harder to track. Your employer will not have the resources to do it.
First, following a chain is not as hard as you’re making out and there are existing companies which provide that service, which they’d pay just like they do credit reporting agencies - made easier by the fact that they’d be providing most of your income so it’d be starting with a known point. Mixers can be defeated but simply using one is a red flag.
Second, ordinary people are not going to perfectly follow a complicated setup – it’s not just that they make mistakes, although that’s a certainty, but also that they already aren’t interested in Bitcoin’s higher costs and slower transaction speeds so making those characteristics worse will not increase adoption. “Harder to use, costs more, still less secure than cash!” is not a compelling ad.
> Businesses can, if they choose, cryptographically prove that they have the funds they say they have. Think of the value of that
You mean they can make the same statements which businesses have been making since ancient times? The problem with all of these systems, as FTX customers can attest, is that the hard part isn’t counting what’s in your ledger but dealing with the real world outside – even if you can see all of my Bitcoin, you can’t know whether I have unrevealed debts or am about to be sued, etc. Since businesses run on credit, that means you still need auditors and courts to deal with the parts of the problem which aren’t simplistic enough for a blockchain.
Yes, following the chain of addresses is pretty easy, but proving who owns which address is not.
Using the new tech like Schnorr signatures is not "a complicated setup" that "has to be maintained perfectly." It is (or will be soon) built-in to the wallet software. You won't have to think about it. Maybe you read a lot about early Bitcoin wallets that didn't even provide unique addresses for each transaction (was that ever even a thing?) but times have changed. The ecosystem just gets better and better.
Also, did you read the article I linked to? In another thread I provided some more explanation and links:
All the chain analysis you have heard of is based on likely patterns and typical behavior of address use in common Bitcoin wallet software. New signature and script schemes have been added to Bitcoin in the past several years that disrupt those patterns and make it even harder to find connections between addresses.
On the business transparency, you seem to completely ignore the cryptographic proof businesses can provide, that's not the same statement that businesses have been making since ancient times. It's a mathematical guarantee. All the rest you point out is true though, and so you are right that it's not a total elimination of potential fraud.
> On the business transparency, you seem to completely ignore the cryptographic proof businesses can provide, that's not the same statement that businesses have been making since ancient times. It's a mathematical guarantee.
It’s a mathematical guarantee in the same way that a bank statement is. It’s extremely rare for the problem to be counting things rather than undisclosed debts, embezzlement, etc. and that kind of thing is just as much of a problem for a Bitcoin user because the real world isn’t on the blockchain. If I look at your balance now, that doesn’t mean that you didn’t borrow 90% of that balance from someone else, neglect to mention that you have paid taxes, transfer it the instant after I signed a contract with you, etc. In all of those cases, we end up in a courtroom where a napkin with the CEO’s signature saying “IOU $1,0000,000” and a witness has the same legal weight as the Bitcoin network.
And sorry, I know I should but I can't just let this go. You keep comparing Bitcoin to cash, as if cash is the solution to the unbanking problem we are talking about. You say this about Bitcoin vs. cash:
“Harder to use, costs more, still less secure than cash!”
None of those are absolutely true. For a local transaction in small amounts, yes, cash is easier and cheaper. For large transactions or for transactions with someone who is geographically far away, cash loses on all three of those, big time. I don't even need to explain why do I?
People do track cash by serial number, each and every bill has a unique one. However in practice it doesn't happen a lot. I would think that's because:
- There are a whole lot of bills to keep track of
- The serial numbers are not easily stored and compared with computers (at least not for private individuals)
That second point, bills not being on computers, is why cash isn't the easy answer to the banking problems we are discussing here. You can't pay someone across the country very easily using dollar bills.
With Bitcoin, there actually aren't any bills or tokens with serial numbers attached to them. There are however, as you point out, unique addresses for each transaction. Like the vast number of paper bill serial numbers, there are a lot of possibly Bitcoin addresses. Far, far more than there are paper dollar bills, sands in the sea, and stars in the sky, actually.
It is, however, somewhat possible to track Bitcoin going too and from the addresses because it is all on computers and this is a trade off of Bitcoin being permission-less and not controlled by a single entity that can decide to unbank you, and online so that you can send it to people across the country.
So, as you point out, if someone publicly associates themselves with a Bitcoin address, and if they reuse that address over and over, you can see how much Bitcoin is going into and out of that address, and if the other addresses in these transactions are also known, then you can easily see that Bob sent Alice some Bitcoin. Address reuse and publicly associating yourself with an address was unfortunately common in the early days of Bitcoin, but practically it never never happens anymore. Instead each and every transaction uses a new unique address, and as I said before, there a vast huge number of possible addresses.
As for exchanges, yes, they do have identities associated with Bitcoin addresses. You can easily accept bitcoin from an exchange and then transfer it again to other addresses that have not been publicly associated with you.
Also, hopefully someday exchanges won't be necessary.
> It is, however, somewhat possible to track Bitcoin going too and from the addresses because it is all on computers and this is a trade off of Bitcoin being permission-less and not controlled by a single entity that can decide to unbank you, and online so that you can send it to people across the country.
It's not "somewhat" possible, it's 100% possible because the history is public and permanent. If you make a mistake once in your entire life Chainalysis will see through anything you previously did to obscure a transaction.
There is no personally identifiable information stored in the public ledger. Just addresses, scripts, and Bitcoin amounts. If someone that knows you (like an employer or a Bitcoin exchange) sends you Bitcoin, they will know addresses that you claimed were yours. As soon as the Bitcoin moves from those addresses to another address then the provable link to you is broken.
All the chain analysis you have heard of is based on likely patterns and typical behavior of address use in common Bitcoin wallet software. New signature and script schemes have been added to Bitcoin in the past several years that disrupt those patterns and make it even harder to find connections between addresses.
"Addresses" are personally identifiable information if you're associated with one, or if you use an exchange, which you'd want to because most people providing goods and services (and also your local tax authority) want the local currency.
If you're claiming these upgrades made Bitcoin anonymous in 2021, that's obviously not true, since multiple people who stole billions of dollars of bitcoins from exchanges have been caught with chain analysis since then.
Ok, first off, let's take a step back here. We are discussing a solution to this unbanking problem, but you and I have gotten off into the weeds a little about hiding actual criminal activity. Bitcoin is not 100% private, but it did take 10 years and this guy inviting the police into his home where they found his physical bitcoin wallets in order for him to get caught. That only supports the point I'm making that Bitcoin anonymity, though not perfect, is still pretty damn good. Good enough to fix this current unbanking problem.
Bitcoin is not magical and perfect, trade-offs have to be made in any endeavor. I personally think the ones Bitcoin has made are good ones. Maybe you still disagree.
Nah, the real issue (which it shares with every other crypto project) is that it invented a kind of decentralized network that doesn't get better with more nodes but still manages to use more energy.
Of course, all later ones are funnier. People think Ethereum is a distributed computer! But the whole network runs at the speed of a single node.
If you want to trade numbers with people over the internet, I recommend using Google Sheets. Maybe ban people if they edit it wrong.
True. But now hand someone that lives in a different state or country some cash. Oh wait, you can't easily do that. There are trade-offs in everything.
Yes, we are in the early stages of Bitcoin and not a lot of people are using it. But we are talking about the properties it has inherently and by design. It is designed to be permissionless, everyone is allowed and able to use it. The current situation with regards to use/adoption are not the end game
You shouldn't have intelligent conversations with crypto people any more than any other kind of scammer. They're going to pickpocket you while you do it.
Sorry for the confusion. The term Bitcoin can be used to refer to the code that runs the Bitcoin network upon which the Bitcoin currency/token moves around and is stored. The inventors could probably have come up with different names for each of those things, but what can you do?
Cryptocurrency folks do sometimes take the open source Bitcoin code and make small (or large) changes to it in order to do their work. When they do this they create a separate codebase, separate network, and a separate currency. Almost inevitably they do so in such a way as to greatly benefit themselves and to fool you.
Yeah, I've messed with the stuff a bit in the past. I understand the technical details decently well.
I don't see any significant difference between Bitcoin and the rest. Bitcoin was just the first thing that stuck but that doesn't grant it any special privileges.
If you can't figure out why Bitcoin stuck and the others didn't then maybe you should put a little more effort into understanding the differences. Or just respectfully stay out of these conversations maybe?
> If you can't figure out why Bitcoin stuck and the others didn't then maybe you should put a little more effort into understanding the differences.
Yeah, inertia, social pressure, and economic incentives. For instance miners are into it for the money, so to them technology doesn't matter. A technologically superior network is of no use to a miner if mining for it makes less money.
> Or just respectfully stay out of these conversations maybe?
I guess it depends what you mean by "number 1" but we are claiming that it is the number one best ;)
In all seriousness, it's not just a talking point. Bitcoin's invention, promises, implementation, and operation has significant fundamental differences from all the others. If all you can be bothered to do is say, "yep, they all look the same to me," then maybe just sit out this conversation?
Banks hide behind Bank Secrecy Act and other regulations in order to debank people. Chase closed my account, and the reason Chase gave: "Financial institutions have an obligation to know our customers and monitor transactions that flow through our customers' accounts. After careful consideration, we decided to close your account because of unexpected activity on these or another Chase account."
I didn't dispute any transactions, nor did I deposit any fraudulent checks, no check bounces, no overdrafts, no cash deposits, no wires, not an instance of disrespecting any Chase employee either on phone or in person. Yes, I used Zelle often, I deposited checks often. When people complain about debanking, many folks defend these banks, saying that there are good reasons for these banks to close (some transaction, etc).
Banks are heavily regulated, I understand. Regulators want to see a certain number of SAR and CTR filings based on the size of bank. If a bank has 1M accounts, regulators want to see a certain number of SAR/CTR filings, a certain number of account closures; regulators go hard on financial institutions, if the latter don't follow the industry average (#SARs, #CTRs, #closures). This has created a vicious loop: banks use machine-learning/AI to flag accounts; then, back office employees 95% of the time just close these accounts.
Welcome to the new debanking world. Chase and many others also monitor your political activity, social media, protests, etc. If they don't like you, they can close your account by simply stating that "we have an obligation to know our customers; after careful consideration, we decided to close your account". When banks decide to close your checking accounts, beware that they also close your credit cards (esp Chase is notorious for this).
Lots of discussion in the comments here about how ingrained banks are into our current system. I do honestly see Bitcoin as a way out of that, but at this early stage of it, you'd probably have to get help from someone who is not debanked in order to interact with our heavily banked system. If you are honestly interested in this, take a close look at Strike.
I mostly agree with krupan's answer below, but it depends on use-case.
BTC for investment or long-term store of value. BCH, or various other alternatives (Litecoin, XRP, Stellar, cough Nano cough), for making payments. But if you can use the Lightning network, then BTC works for payments as well (arguably - in this space anything and everything is highly arguable).
If you're seriously looking down the track at using cryptocurrency, spend some time playing with small amounts of it to see how it all works. Different coins have different use-cases, and it's very confusing to come from zero knowledge. Also transferring and converting between different coin types can kill you in fees, so keep an eye on that as well.
And in doing your research don't believe what anyone says about anything, especially youtube folks. Find the most likely narratives amongst the jungle of snakes and traps, based on your own experience at detecting bullshit and applying logic.
I'm sorry, but playing with anything other than BTC Bitcoin and lightning is just going to waste your time and resources. I'm sorry, but the last 15 years has taught us that again and again. Definitely do your own research, start with small amounts, but be very, very careful especially with anything not BTC.
Comment feels like a great example of a bitcoin-maxi. An important data point, worth paying strong heed to, but also worth understanding the reasons behind bitcoin-maxi perspectives in order to see where you fit along the scale.
Bitcoin itself has the longest, most proven history. It's the safest house in the least safe neighbourhood. It's also the best performing asset of it's lifetime so far (something like that anyway).
It's use-case has changed since it was created, and there are additional use-cases to which other cryptocurrencies cater, smart contracts being the primary example (which then facilitate a whole other ecosystem of products, of arguable value and utility to humanity).
I'm around 50% bitcoin-maxi, to expose my illogical stance :)
I also have barely a little toe dipped into that particular asset pool, so my opinion isn't necessarily fully formed or well founded.
I was answering the question about how to interact with non-bitcoin users today. That requires trusting some third party. Strike is a good one for making Venmo like payments. The best exchange right now that I have found is Swan.
Could you clarify what you find interesting about it?
I skimmed their website and looks like just a lightning wallet. Am I missing some key feature that helps one interact with fiat systems?
> How can I pay my bills with bitcoin while being debanked?
Acting as an alternative to krupan's Bitcoin-centric answer:
- There are other crypto rails other than Bitcoin that could be used in its place. USDC & stablecoins in general is going to be the medium-term winners in this space, as more services are set up to help people pay their bills with stablecoins. Here are 2 services that I've found within a few minutes of searching "USDC pay bill":
> > Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain.
> I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.
Term by term:
- EVM-equivalent: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the part that allows smart contract code can be run on the network. EVM-equivalency means that you can just drop in your smart contract code, and it has to run as it would on Ethereum itself.
- Optimistic Rollup: A Rollup is the current consensus for scaling up the network, by outsourcing compute to other networks, and pushing the important end state back into Ethereum. Optimistic rollups do this by assuming that there'll be at least 1 person to challenge a proposed block whenever that block's invalid. This setup however has the shortcoming of needing there to be a challenge window for other participants in the network to have time to respond.
Just as an FYI, USDC & stablecoins (and CBDC's) are centralised and the same abuse of power is possible here too. Obviously being debanked in fiat and crypto at the same time is extremely unlikely...but possible if someone is REALLY out to get you.
> Just as an FYI, USDC & stablecoins (and CBDC's) are centralised and the same abuse of power is possible here too.
It's the unfortunate consequence of one gigantic unaddressable problem:
USD can only be minted efficiently by the Fed.
- Collateralized stablecoins exist, but they're inefficient in that they must be overcollateralized to cushion against falling asset values.
- USDC & their kind are efficient, but at the cost of being centralization vectors as a result of current US legislation
- An efficient synthetic stablecoin can exist, but it requires deep liquidity in the marketplace to keep the peg stable. (Probably > $100B at the ready to absorb panic sells) Synthetic stocks are the closest analogy available for this, but applied upon a currency. The chicken-and-egg means that bootstrapping something like this is not feasible at small scales: It needs to be big from the get go.
You can't. Every US Dollar touch point is heavily regulated. Back in the day Local Bitcoins was the way to convert crypto to cash but now its highly regulated and they implemented enhanced anti money laundering controls.
Ethereum trumps bitcoin in pretty much every metric except for market cap, which is lagging because bitcoin has the name brand, simpler for people to understand, and misinformation spread by bitcoin maxis and competing chains
Bitcoin is ever innovating in ways that are safe and transparent, see Taproot that was added fairly recently. Other crypto has proven to be at best run by incompetent folks, at worst straight up scams. Either way you lose with them. Sorry, but that's what the years have taught us.
Well, I would totally disagree. I love safe and transparent but it is just not what gets the job done. I've had to transfer money to people around the world and people have asked to send them dollar-pegged tokens on networks like Tron and Polygon. These are not ideologically sexy networks at all but they have clearly found product-market fit. Metamask (convenience) + low fees + fiat peg (less volatility and easier to understand) and people are all about it. And, whether we like it or not, it works.
Meanwhile I've had the majority of my net worth on Ethereum for over 5 years now and am not really worried about it. And I get user experience that I can never get with bitcoin, like social recovery smart contract wallets.
Safe? Tacking on higher energy-costs through more complexity and increasing pollution across the planet as a result of the increased energy expenditure is safe innovation?
Distributed permissionless databases of any sort are a bust and a scam, period. This was tested and found true in the 70s.
Without a general purpose (i.e. Turing complete) and sufficiently expressive programming language (i.e. providing an idiomatic and expressive manner to build general-purpose logic) associated to the ledger you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger. Nor a financial system that inherits those same properties.
If you think about it you are very limited in what you can do. You have an asset that you can self-custody, exchange permissionlessly and without censorship which is good to fight what the original article is about. But you cannot build any financial product on top of it that would have those same properties. Nor be able to scale the transactions per second that the base layer does while keeping those same properties. And I find it very unlikely you can serve the entire world with 7 transactions per second. So yes, there is plenty to innovate on its core function.
> you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger
Correct, and yet you seem to still miss the point. There are tradeoffs. You can't scale AND maintain those properties. This is why Bitcoin scales with layer 2 solutions like Lightning (and more ideas like Enigma, Ark, Cashu etc.), or things like RGB or Taro for expressiveness. Separation of concerns.
The best attempts to have their cake and eat it too have failed in crypto.
There is very little innovation to be had in the core function of what a blockchain was designed to achieve. There's plenty of innovation ahead of us for the layers that are built on top of it.
zk-proofs allow you to do so. It's seeing very active development, and yes it involves an L2. The issue you seemed to have ignored is that to be able for the L2s to inherit those properties from the L1, the L1 needs to have sufficient expressiveness to be able to build the proof verifiers. I would love to see how anyone builds such a thing on bitcoin.
* Efficiency - allowing small scale players to participate in verification and block production.
* Inter-chain communication - some networks are explicitly designed as connected swarms of chains (Cosmos and polkadot for example) and some evolving into that direction outside of the protocol level (Ethereum). How do execute transactions that span the networks is an ongoing research topic.
* Privacy - how to execute transactions in private. How to attest that something is true, say that you have a certain credential, without exposing your account information. Blockchain has been why zero knowledge (and now homo-morphic encryption it seems) cryptography are becoming an active field of research.
* Identity, authentication, account recovery. - these tie into cryptography but generally research on applied cryptography with good UX. For example the first time I've seen social-recovery accounts with any amount of usage (now a feature in Apple accounts) was in a blockchain application.
* Monetary research - far from everybody involved in crypto believes that a fixed-supply rare item makes for good money. "Fiat" money is basically a "token" with governance attached to it. This has lead to a wave of experimentation with other forms of tokens - ones that are algorithmically tied to other assets, ones that are backed by an organization, local currencies, etc.
* Organizational research - since smart contracts can effectively be transparent community banks there's has been a plethora of experiments with building organizations that manage their own treasuries. Horizontalism, organizational transparency and cooperation is something that's been at the core of many crypto projects, the idea being that something cannot be both a reliable public good and controlled by a single party. It's not an easy task, but some cool organizations have come out of this. For an example look at pocket: https://messari.io/report/governor-note-proof-of-participati...
How about metrics like answering the question of, "how much of the coin exists?" Or metrics like, "how understandable and simple is the overall protocol and mining scheme?" Or "has this chain ever broken it's own rules and rolled back transactions at the behest of its benevolent dictator?"
Spoiler: Bitcoin wins on all of those. The market cap is better for a reason.
>"has this chain ever broken it's own rules and rolled back transactions at the behest of its benevolent dictator?"
Bitcoin has also done this.
You're referring to the $50m DAO smart contract bug (or "hack") early in 2016, when Ethereum had been running for about a year. The Ethereum blockchain was swiftly rolled back. This was achieved by the majority of Ethereum developers agreeing to create an update to Ethereum software that reversed the hackers transactions specifically, and the great majority of users and miners agreeing to use that updated software. The people behind the DAO were closely connected to the Ethereum developers. Some of them were Ethereum developers. Some of the people who lost money in the DAO were Ethereum developers.
What you're unaware of apparently, is that when Bitcoin had been running for about a year, in 2010, a bug allowed someone to create 184 billion Bitcoins. This effectively made everybody's Bitcoins worthless (or even more worthless!). This event was ALSO swiftly rolled back, just like the Ethereum DAO event, by the same consensus process that I described above.
"Core developers Gavin Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto were on the case, and the 184 billion BTC transaction was purged from block 74638."
Since then, there have been various incidents involving Ethereum and Bitcoin and hacks or smart contract bugs that caused losses of millions or billions. But neither currency has ever done a roll back of this nature again.
For instance. A year or so after Ethereum's DAO debacle, there was another similar event, the Parity bug, which accidentally locked $230m in a smart contract, permanently. The people operating Parity were closely connected to the Ethereum developers, some of them were Ethereum developers. But this time, although the victims pleaded for a roll back, it was never seriously considered.
> But neither currency has ever done a roll back of this nature again.
Maybe not a rollback, but Ethereum has proven it is malleable time and time again. As one example, compare the issuance of ether to Bitcoin. Eth's issuance is a dog's breakfast, indicative of changing opinions by those who call the shots... just like a central bank.
Bitcoin's issuance? Predictable and steady as a rock for 15 years.
Another example is replacing Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Stake. A core part of how it works, important for censorship resistance and accessibility, and they removed it for something permissioned that makes censorship far easier.
Bitcoin? Still on PoW and never going to change. If you think it will change, you still don't understand Bitcoin. But never fear, there's already a PoS Bitcoin out there (that no one uses).
I don't know why you're replying to my comment, because I wasn't talking about any of those other issues you've said here. I did not confirm or deny them.
I quoted the single issue that I was disputing. I wrote as clearly as possible to only refute one point, about the implication that Bitcoin had never done a roll back.
If you want to talk about all those other things, then make a separate thread or post,. Please don't use my comment as a vehicle for your arguments, because it's confusing and few people will understand what you're talking about.
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't know that bit of Bitcoin history. I see a big fundamental difference between that chain fork and the ethereum DAO fork. The bitcoin fork was to fix a bug in the bitcoin source code. Without doing that fork, bitcoin would have died. All bitcoin users would have suffered if the fork had not been done. No bitcoin users complained about it.
The ethereum fork was to fix a bug in a smart contract running on top of ethereum. That bug only affected those who were participating in that smart contract (which was code for an investment scheme that a private organization had dreamed up). Lots of ethereum users complained about it.
Yes, I do see some differences. It's true that the situations were not identical. Thanks for your interesting reply.
One important difference is that the amount of money lost in the DAO was MUCH larger than the amount lost by the Bitcoin bug (the Bitcoin bug simply lost the total value of all valid Bitcoins, which I guess was only about $1m at that time in 2010, with few individuals holding substantial amounts). This meant that not much money was at stake and fewer people were affected, so the roll back was less contentious.
:
But there's a VERY important similarity between the two events: They were both existential threats to the respective currency.
That existential threat to Bitcoin was obvious. As you have just said, Bitcoin would have died if they did not quickly invalidate the 'faked' Bitcoins, because the quantity completely dwarfed the true Bitcoin money supply. So it was clearly the right thing to do.
The existential threat of the DAO bug to Ethereum was less clear. There was also more time to decide what to do, because the stolen funds had not yet been released from the smart contract, (and I recall the money could be stalled in the contract almost indefinitely by white hat hackers iteratively exploiting the same bug that had created the problem.)
But the consensus at the time, very early in Ethereum's life, was that Ethereum might die if 15% of the entire currency was in a state of limbo, or in the hands of a malicious hacker. This was compounded by the reputational damage and loss of confidence caused by such a huge disaster that directly impacted thousands of the most active Ethereum users, not just a few Ethereum developers.
:
I pointed out that some Ethereum developers lost substantial amounts in the DAO, so I can accept that personal financial loss probably also biased the decisions of some of them to approve a roll back.
But I personally don't believe that personal loss suffered by some Ethereum developers was a very significant factor in the decision to do a roll back of the DAO event. To explain my reasoning: That is why I mentioned the Parity bug.
The Parity bug was an even larger loss in financial terms, but it only affected a very small number of people, who mostly were Ethereum developers. The lost money was destroyed, not stolen. It did not affect the wider community, so it was not seen as an existential threat to Ethereum. So there was no question of a roll back.
:
Possibly the quite acrimonious argument over the DAO fix, which was bad enough to cause a semi-viable hard fork (creating the ETC currency), was an additional factor discouraging the developers and community from accepting a roll back to fix the Parity bug and later incidents.
Edit: Like you've mentioned, another difference is that the Bitcoin issue was a bug in Bitcoin itself. The Ethereum issues were coding bugs in smart contracts. I'm just making an observation about that, not claiming that one currency is better than the other.
The bitcoin fork was to fix a broken promise. The bug meant that Bitcoin didn't work as promised, the code fix and fork fixed that.
One of Ethereum's promises around smart contracts was, "code is law." The fork broke that promise by circumventing the smart contract code.
It is good that they have never done that again, but they have been making other big changes to the original Ethereum code not to fix bugs and broken promises, but to change the way it works. That, to me, is a concern.
"Since then, there have been various incidents involving Ethereum and Bitcoin and hacks or smart contract bugs that caused losses of millions or billions"
Sneaky of you to add "Bitcoin" to that sentence, implying that smart contract bugs on Bitcoin, or Bitcoin hacks have cost people millions or billions. That is completely false, but nice try.
Honestly, I'm not trying to be "sneaky". I didn't mean to imply that Bitcoin has suffered from disastrous smart contract bugs like Ethereum has, or that the core Bitcoin or core Ethereum systems had ever been hacked since that time.
The hacks I was talking about were just all the numerous attacks on exchanges and users that have involved BTC or ETH getting stolen.
It's sort of tedious discussing this kind of thing on HN because there will always be some guy who jumps in and says 'Well, ACTUALLY, what about SBF and FTX!!" even though I'm not talking about that. So, I just wanted to admit there had been many other financial losses, to try to avoid all those clever people replying and telling me about MtGox or Tether or something like that, as if I didn't already know about it. Kind of like that other guy who replied to my comment with something mostly irrelevant that he wanted to spout.
I didn't have time to write that all out in such pedantically specific detail - almost nobody is reading this. So, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding that I created. I was not being sneaky. You know: Sometimes, people just don't have time to explain everything in detail.
You seem like someone who is able to see this side of the argument, so thank you again for your comments.
Actually... the account model is much easier to use to get an accurate view of all balances than the UTXO model. As for rollbacks, Bitcoin had one in 2010 (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident) and a chain fork in 2013 (https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork) both decided by those who could make the decision... and accepted by a majority of nodes, same as with the ETH hard fork
I'm not so sure about understandability at protocol level, I do believe Ethereum to be straightforward but then again I've followed its progress over the years
Finally looked at both of those bitcoin events that you are attempting to equate to the DAO fork. I commented about the first one elsewhere here. The second one was indeed a chain fork, which is actually a normal and expected event in Bitcoin when miners disagree (for whatever reason) about which blocks are valid or not.
In this case the disagreement happened because of a backwards incompatible change that was accidentally made to the mining software. Nodes running the old software rejected blocks generated by the new software. The bug was fixed and miners happily stopped using the buggy version of code and the chain fork was resolved, just as designed by the Bitcoin protocol. Nodes that never ran the buggy version didn't have to do a thing.
Like my discussion of the other bitcoin fork, this to me looks like an entirely different category of event than the DAO. Bitcoin fixed a broken promise in both cases. Ethereum broke a promise in the DAO fork.
Why reach for crypto? My strategy would be to have a small emergency fund with a different bank. The risk of being debanked by two independent banks _at the same time_ seems lower than crypto.
> The risk of being debanked by two independent banks _at the same time_ seems lower than crypto.
I use 3 separate banks for this reason. But honestly, the 'reason' for dropping me might be a 3rd party risk assessment that flags something and services all three banks... Or some sort of story or hysteria that could trigger three similar systems.
Using a decent crypto currency with good practice, the biggest threat is me messing something up. And i can put systems in place to minimize this. The only issue is that most things i spend moneys on don't accept crypto and so still need banking services to use crypto. I hope this changes.
I use 5 different banks and have cash. The problem is that with the lame (primarily US driven) overreaching AML nonsense, banks will not take any risks and close whatever they don't make a lot of money on at the first sign of issues. Why would they not. What do you do if multiple/all banks closed your accounts for no reason at all outside that you are too small a fish to put an actual human on to verify the validity of the closure? Is there anything outside crypto and stuffing money and gold in your mattress?
...until they implement a system to automatically corroborate your accounts and close them all at once, which will happen, "because crime". security theater only gets worse over time. but right now you "hackers" can stop this since 99% of transactions can still be done in cash. but you won't because you're all fake.
Sorry to hear your story/experience. This worries me because my mother, who currently resides in a SE Asian nation, is transferring some of her money to me (in the hope that she can use it when she migrates to the US).
Did Chase let you withdraw the outstanding balance in full when they closed your account? The last thing I want is to see my money being trapped in limbo state...
Yes, they sent me a cashier check for a small balance (around $1000) I left, as Chase gave me 45 days heads up for closure. However, for some people, Chase dragged out until after CFPB complaints are filed.
The case one should worry about these banks is this: you deposit a $500K check, or you got a wire for $500K; check was cleared on the sender's side. Now Chase/Big Bank holds your funds, saying that this check is fraudulent, and that bank closes your account after finding you risky (risky because of this $500k and by looking back at your account history). Now $500K is in Chase's hands, your account is closed by Chase, and Chase doesn't want to give $500K, nor does Chase want to return $500K to the original bank/sender. This is where you should file a complaint with CFPB right away. Without CFPB complaints, the fraud department at Chase, its Bank employees just give you run around for months. File CFPB complaint right away, if any bank holds your funds after 10 business days; don't listen to these employees at all.
CFPB can't force banks to reopen your accounts. Just to get your funds, file a complaint with CFPB right away, and don't trust any bank employee on getting your funds.
I'm very far from dealing with 500k personal banking transactions, but my immediate thought is that if you're doing so you're probably making mistakes. If it's revenue from sale of a company or similar, move it through escrow with your attorney. If it's a legal settlement, do the same. If you don't have an attorney but are dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars, get an attorney. If it's income from trading or investing it should likely be a transaction from a recognized brokerage which shouldn't raise red flags - and if it's a private investment, see above about an attorney.
And of course if it's business transactions, do it with a business account.
I just gave an example based on what I read on reddit, as I never deposited $500K in my life. I have no problems with banks' closing accounts, as I have accounts with a couple of local credit unions, who are nice to me.
What caused the closure? A legitimate transaction that they find suspicious. Conjunction of two issues--not sending the funds back and closing the account without releasing funds to the customer--is real 'thievery' in my opinion. Since big banks are NOT interested in resolving disputes about funds by lying to customers, better file a complaint with CFPB right away with many details and documents.
One should get an attorney if they desire legal representation, period. Otherwise it's quite perverse to be contributing to one of the main guilds facilitating this cesspool of overregulation, just in the hopes that their social status is going to make a bank think twice. And also attorneys aren't immune from this. In fact, one reason to actually get an attorney is that you want to launder some money.
Also, business accounts aren't immune from this dynamic, as per the article. It seems like you're just grasping at bureaucratic straws here in search of the just world theory. But no, the whole thing is really an accountable terrible dynamic that will continue to get worse and worse until it affects enough people that the laws change.
You obviously can't cold call an attorney and ask for help laundering money. But if you find a money laundering operation through the proper channels, then it will likely involve a law firm somewhere that's facilitating making it properly legible to the system - setting up less-than-truthful companies, generating copious fraudulent documentation, etc. If anything attorneys' trust accounts should be receiving more scrutiny rather than less - using your account to handle money held in trust for someone else is generally something that sets off compliance department alarm bells, and for good reason (well, as good of a reason as there can be in the context of this topic).
Lawyers are not of much help when it comes to reopening already-closed accounts. Most of the time, banks will send a cashier check for whatever money left, if they close accounts abruptly. Sometimes, they give a month to move funds elsewhere. When a bank closes an account for that last check which they find suspicious--subsequently cleared by the payee bank, that's when banks give a run around. File a complaint with CFPB without any lawyer, unless of course that amount is substantial.
I agree - you don't need an attorney to file a complaint with the CFPB, and you should file a complaint with the CFPB ASAP when a bank starts pulling this crap. But the comment I was responding to was saying you should have an attorney to handle any large transaction, which I disagree with.
I wouldn't expect them to help with reopening, but if a bank is investigating an unexpected large deposit and determines that "Oh, it's coming from a law firm's escrow account" it gives at least one obvious possible explanation - and may also indicate to investigators that the account holder is someone with legal representation so don't be sloppy.
When you buy a house an attorney is likely involved, but, in any case, you're going to be transferring the 500k through escrow, not making a direct deposit or wire transfer.
Glad to hear they gave your money back in full. I'm now really concerned. It sucks that there seems to be no accountability in the system. I get that they want to catch the folks who abuse the banking system, but if they do, they (the government and the banks) should at least set up a proper channel to give reasons and allow folks like us (regular Joe's) to file complaints. The current system seems really ripe for abuse.
If you are moving this much money regularly using these means you will be using a private bank which is a completely different experience. Maybe some people get caught in the transition to wealth before private banking but having moved significant amounts of money a few times, the banks generally do not want to hang onto it against your will.
Kind of amazing that doing “aaand it’s gone” with $500k that is provably legitimate is “an issue requiring a complaint to a specialized bureau” and not “a grand larceny charge from the DA.”
> This worries me because my mother, who currently resides in a SE Asian nation, is transferring some of her money to me (in the hope that she can use it when she migrates to the US).
The problem is what you are describing is not exactly legal. You are acting as a money transmitter for your mother; and this might even trigger for you some complex tax obligations.
What you should do is open a Chase bank account for your mother. You already bank with the agency.
The article demonstrated over and over that in some instances branch managers really did know their customers, and that knowledge was ignored by an algorithm run amuck. Monitoring transactions should not be sufficient to satisfy KYC.
Perhaps this article demonstrates that the largest banks are unable to know their customers and truly act on that information. And, perhaps having those banks engage in self-destructive mass cancelations serves regulators' purposes just fine.
No such thing as "an algorithm run amuck" - more like "another department run amuck". Someone programmed the thing, someone is running it deliberately.
Regulators fined Chase and other big banks for "weak controls". One way to show that these big banks have "strong controls" is to change parameters for these algorithms. Many legitimate transactions fall under structuring, layering, smurfing, laundering. After all, any goal of money laundering is to make their transactions appear "legitimate". Now almost all transactions (except for big businesses and people with few bills and pay stubs) come under scrutiny.
Strong controls = more false positives, more account closures, more SAR reports. That's what regulators want, and politicians don't want to rein on these regulators either by amending laws or by reducing "too much discretion" given to regulators. Of course, those affected by debanking (ordinary citizens and small businesses) don't have that kind of lobbying power to bring any such changes.
Big businesses instead can own small banks in fly over states, and run their transactions through those banks. Maybe, it is time to bank with local credit unions, as the latter allow mobile deposits. Once FedNow takes hold across credit unions, better switch to credit unions.
Another lesson: every one should have at least three checking accounts (one or two big banks; one or two credit unions).
All the examples cited in the article were with big banks who are probably the ones most likely to be employing these automated systems and getting pressure from regulators. For the benefit of decentralization and avoidance of CBDC's I am moving my accounts more to the smaller regional banks.
> One way to show that these big banks have "strong controls" is to change parameters for these algorithms
imagine if some bank knowingly facilitated money laubdering, and needed to show they gave strong controls. What eould you do?
Thats right, you would close 10k minor accounts of random schmucks for 'suspicious activity', report 'job done' to the regulator, and continue your corrupt practices
The fundamental problem here is that these regulations are totally useless. Look into the effectiveness of KYC laws -- they're basically zero percent effective.
And the reason for that is that if anybody knew that somebody was engaged in criminal activity, they wouldn't have their bank account closed, they would be arrested and their finances seized by court order. So the bank account closures only happen to people for whom there is not enough evidence to charge them with a crime. In other words, a ton of innocent people.
Conversely, the bank is not a law enforcement agency and has no real way to distinguish between the kind of criminals who know how not to be obvious and the aforementioned totally innocent people, and if anything the practiced criminals are the ones who know how not to trigger the fraud detection algorithms, unlike the innocent people.
So the criminals don't get caught and the government blames the banks for this, but the banks still don't have any good way to know who the criminals actually are, so all they can ever do is round up random innocent people to put on a show of punishing somebody.
The fraud is that law enforcement should be an obligation of the banking system and that fraud needs to be eliminated.
> imagine if some bank knowingly facilitated money laundering
You won't have to imagine very hard, HSBC was caught laundering money, told they had to strengthen their controls, but ultimately all the Justice Department wanted was a small cut of the action in the form of fines and HSBC has been allowed to continue their corrupt practices even after being caught laundering money again and again (in addition to all kinds of other crimes). It seems like as long as they can pay the fines, banks are basically above the law.
One way to prove weak controls is also to show that low-level branch employees have the ability to override AML/KYC flags, and regularly do so. That's not just poor controls, it's demonstrating knowledge of the transactions being suspicious while enabling them anyway.
GP says "monitoring transactions should not be sufficient to satisfy KYC" - of course monitoring transactions is required to satisfy AML, flagging any transactions indicates specific knowledge of them being suspicious, and failing to act in any cases where it was warranted will be used as proof of lax controls, with fines starting in the hundreds of millions.
Isn't this where documentation of actual KYC would come in? "Flagged for reason X; Overridden by local manager - follows 10 lines of CYA justification"? Normally that's good enough for administrations.
The second time it's flagged for reason X+1, include 10 lines from rank 2 manager.
It seemed in these reports that the local manager was surprised. ... But it may be that they were only "suprised", i.e. not about to say that the system did prompt them but they ignored the prompt. Possible. It is also possible that the bank only prompts the local manager if the client has enough estimated net worth or estimated lifetime client business value. The kind of thing that might make sense but wouldn't be disclosed until there is a lawsuit.
Wrt keeping multiple accounts, what is the benefit of that compared to the overhead of monitoring and managing them? Is it just a contingency? Banks in particular have no real reason to give you your money back or respect your privacy. Why would I put my money in an institution that I can't trust?
In this context, the implied reason is that your still have a bank account if one of the banks decides to close or freeze your account. If you can do without an account altogether (how??), good for you, I guess.
Banks send out a cashier check upon closing accounts. I was pointing out some edge cases (last deposited check being the culprit of closure; however, this check was cleared by the payee bank). Contingency is one reason. It also depends on what you use banks for. If it is direct deposit from jobs and paying bills, big banks are okay.
The moment you start use Zelle heavily, one of those zelle recipients is linked with suspicious activity, that's a problem (btw, Zelle is owned by big banks). Banks find so many things suspicious: many check deposits, many zelle transfers, low balances, many cash/money order deposits, asking for cashier checks, wires(both domestic and foreign), any crypto activity, being a public figure, names similar to those on OFAC list, etc. Basically, they want normal customers (4 pay stubs, paying 10 bills a month) or extremely wealthy clients. Otherwise, you don't fit the average profile, and whatever you do is construed as not being legitimate.
> Maybe, it is time to bank with local credit unions, as the latter allow mobile deposits.
I've never used a credit union and have had access to mobile deposits at everything from large multinational banks to small local ones for well over a decade.
Or rather two departments being very good boys: these banks claim to have human reviewers. A first level of automatic flagging (with people running that) and a human review that the flagging deserves debanking (with people doing and running that).
The second, human level is off shore and very tough to get clear with even if nothing was truly wrong. Chase once gave me exactly 7 days around the holidays to present a power of attorney, with no way to escalate or just leave the account frozen a little longer. Since that crew is sitting in the other side of the planet and Christmas is meaningless they didn't care. I survived that episode with them but it gave me the heads up to look around.
>No such thing as "an algorithm run amuck" - more like "another department run amuck". Someone programmed the thing, someone is running it deliberately.
Not to defend banks, but you know how many bugs the average large software system has?
With such a critical activity that has the potential to destroy lives, "a bug" is not a good enough excuse. Hire a human to override the bug driven decision. These aren't bugs but conscious decisions taken by each bank because the fallout is on few enough customers that they don't need to worry. I've worked with/in enough banks to know someone intentionally drew a line and everyone who happens to fall under it can just suck it up.
You're not wrong. Chase has 18.5 million checking accounts and 25 million debit cards, so they can afford to lose a whole lot of small customers while still saving a bunch of money with the automation.
That’s the danger with the size of these things. With 18.5 million customers, they could literally murder a couple dozen a year and it’d be hardly noticeable.
I'm not arguing that the system must not have bugs, really - you are right there. I'm arguing that since everyone knows it does, then the system must provide for that. That is, the institution that we are buying the service from needs to be able to sort things out when it happens. Here we have abundant examples where they have no plan to even notice anything. - And that then they should not be surprised when we are desperate to find a better institution that is not THEM.
This reminds me of a common scam that casinos pull: if someone gets caught gambling when they weren't allowed to be, the casino will unwind everything if there was a net win, but will leave it stand if there was a net loss.
At least in the UK, NatWest debanked Neil Farage's account for his political views. Even its CEO resigned over her lying.
"19 Republican states accuse JPMorgan of closing bank accounts and discriminating against customers due to their religious or political beliefs" [1][3]. Of course, this site is not favorable to conservatives and their views. Some left activists' accounts are closed as well [2].
The fact that someone with a political opinion had their account closed is not evidence that Chase is monitoring all their customers' political activity and systematically closing accounts for political activity Chase doesn't like.
The same way that Chase closing a restaurant's account is not evidence that Chase is tasting the food in every restaurant and systematically closing accounts for restaurants that cook food that Chase doesn't like.
Good that you trust Chase and other banks with the lame 'evidence' that they provide such as: "Financial institutions have an obligation to know our customers and monitor transactions that flow through our customers' accounts. After careful consideration, we decided to close your account because of unexpected activity on these or another Chase account."
Based on that standard template, I won't trust big banks, because, hiding behind BSA, banks can use the blanket statement "because of unexpected activity". Now you ask me to trust Banks, because they can't show that evidence to me.
None of this is about whether I trust Chase or not.
It's about the big claim that Chase monitors the political activity of their customers and systematically closes the accounts of people with opinions Chase doesn't like.
There's precisely zero evidence that they do this.
Even if one blindly accepts your citations from "The 700 Club" and some random post from "Nitter" as authoritative, even they provide zero evidence for that claim.
Big claims require compelling evidence, and you haven't provided any.
Risk avoidance. Extremists (!) are more likely to have dubios donors. And even if they're "normal" political figures or activists, their behaviour in public might damage the bank.
This being said this approach is a pretty wild one still, since people NEED banks, and there should be long duration till the expiration (except in cases of fraud, money laundering, ..)
Natwest's initial response was what you said: his accounts fell below a certain threshold after he paid off his mortgage. Then Farage sought info from Natwest using "subject access request". In those documents, it is "found that an internal committee had deemed his views did not align with the bank's own. This formed part of the basis for cutting him, the document showed, alongside commercial considerations." [1]
You are incorrect. Natwest was forced to release internal documents about the debanking of Nigel Farage under an FOI request and it is clear from the evidence that he was debanked because of his politics.
"Farage used a subject access request to discover that, despite initial denials by NatWest subsidiary Coutts, his political views had played a part in the closure of his account."
> At least in the UK, NatWest debanked Neil Farage's account for his political views. Even its CEO resigned over her lying.
No, a subsidiary of NatWest closed Farage's account when he no longer met the investment thresholds for the account he held. The CEO resigned for telling a journalist the above.
No fan of Farage, but then why was most of the document the bank produced about what he did as a politician? Farage also claims he never met these supposed thresholds.
Combination of reputational damage[0] and him being a PEP.
I believe the account closure was a business decision, but they definitely had no reason to be public about it. One good thing came out of the debacle, though: it put the spotlight on UK retail banking regulations and how they are allowed to treat customers in the first place.
Financial institutions don't like small-time PEPs. They don't net the banks anywhere near the money dictators and kleptocrats do, but are just as likely to engage in ongoing bribery due to their position in society.
0: Farage had apparently been very vocal about having an account with Coutts, and waving that thing around as a sign of ... something. For the bank, that was negative brand value.
Negative brand value is no reason to debank someone, half musicians that do drugs would give their bank a bad name. There must be a legal basis to debank someone.
I don't like Farage's opinions, and being a PEP only means "more eyes on you", doesn't mean "kick them out".
1) Now, if Coutts dropped the ball on something, shame on them. A good lawyer can get some good ££££ for damaging the client's business/etc.
2) If Farage didn't mean a minimum-net-worth.. that's another story.
Farage didn't meet their net worth requirement, which is why his account was closed. A bit like any retail banking product - e.g. HSBC advance, there can be some slack in how strictly the rules are allied. Coutts decided that since he no longer met their net worth requirements, they didn't want to continue to serve him. They may have decided to continue serving other clients whos circumstances changed though for their own reasons.
If farage had met the requirements, none of this would have happened.
That's not what that says. The quote from coutts is even in the HN comment -
> We acknowledge that the information we reported - that Coutts' decision on Mr Farage's account did not involve considerations about his political views - turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage
That does not say that he did meet the net worth requirements. See [0], and read the article. No outlet has retracted the claim that he didn't meet the wealth requirements which is why his account was flagged for review.
I'm a immediate relative of a PEP. And banks treat those just like they treat PEPs.
I've banked in 4 different countries with about 10 banks total, disclosed to them the fact that I'm a PEP or an immediate relative of one, and it has never, ever caused any issue.
> In financial regulation, a politically exposed person (PEP) is one who has been entrusted with a prominent public function. A PEP generally presents a higher risk for potential involvement in bribery and corruption by virtue of their position and the influence they may hold. The terms "politically exposed person" and senior foreign political figure are often used interchangeably, particularly in international forums.
They resigned for telling a journalist that because it was a lie.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-...
Britain's BBC has apologised to Nigel Farage over a story it ran on the closure of his accounts at NatWest's (NWG.L) private bank Coutts, which the former Brexit Party leader had said was the result of his political views.
The BBC had previously reported Farage falling below the financial threshold required to be a customer at Coutts - whose website advises its clients should be able to borrow or invest at least 1 million pounds ($1.28 million) with the bank or hold 3 million pounds in savings - was the reason for the closure.But an internal review of the bank account obtained by Farage showed the private bank's wealth reputational risk committee had said his values did not align with the bank's own.
"We acknowledge that the information we reported - that Coutts' decision on Mr Farage's account did not involve considerations about his political views - turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage," the BBC said in the corrections and clarifications section of its website.
You've made a jump from the article - it doesn't say it was a lie, it says that it wasn't accurate to say that Coutts decision didn't involve considerations about his political views. They're not the same thing.
No outlets have retracted the claim that he didn't meet the wealth criteria, and nobody has claimed that Coutts lied about him meeting the threshold. In fact, every outlet that I checked today stil claims he didn't meet the wealth criteria, and that the CEO resigned because she discussed details of a client's account with a journalist, e.g. [0]
Even if Farange was targeted for his political beliefs, that is independent of whether Chase monitors customers political activites. Farange's politics were a matter of celebrity.
Lower degrees of separation from right-wing militant extremist groups. Also tends to be the sorts of folk who vehemently deny structural racism exists and the irony is entirely lost on them.
In a world where several thousand people have just been killed by an internationally funded terrorist group, I think scrutiny on groups which are (a) armed and (b) make political statements is probably justified. And the argument that "Al-Quds Weekend Rifle Club and Prayer Group" isn't allowed while a comparable Christian one is is pure unconstitutional religious discrimination.
>>In a world where several thousand people have just been killed by an internationally funded terrorist group,
Actions that have been widely celebrate by the political segment of the population that often aligns with the gun control movement.
Actions that could have been curbed if the people that were attacked where allowed to defend themselves in stead of reliance on state protection that never came, and Israel is now rolling back many of their gun control provisions rightly so...
>>I think scrutiny on groups which are (a) armed and (b) make political statements is probably justified.
I think scrutiny on groups which are armed and make clear threats of violence are justified. "political" statements is a bridge to far from me, that applies to all religions.
If you are in the US, express the desire to violently "decolonize" the US or chant "from the river to the sea" then maybe you should be investigated. If you are in the US and express the desire lynch a racial group then maybe you should be investigated.
The problem here is in the US today only one of those groups is actually being investigate. The other are free the vandalize monuments, and storm the capital with out punishment of any type where by if the other group even happens to stroll near a government building they put in prison for years.
How about some equality under the law for a change? People claim they want that but in reality they dont
> If you are in the US, express the desire to violently "decolonize" the US or chant "from the river to the sea" then maybe you should be investigated.
The original founding document of Netanyahu’s Likud party:
The moral equivalency you are attempting to draw between those 2 statements is both ignorant and asinine.
When the terrorist organizations chant "From the river to the sea" they are clearly calling for the forced removal (at best) of all Jews from the land.
A political party that calls for "Israeli sovereignty between the Sea and the Jordan" it is clearly a rejection of the "2 state solution" but that is not a call for the removal of an ethnic population from the region. One critical difference here is you can disagree with that political party, vote them out of that government even, and express full support for a 2 state solution with out being raped, or killed. Somehow I doubt Hamas would allow that.
Israeli a western democracy has an actual framework of secular law and a history of respecting the rights of people including Arabs, Gays, Women ect
Hamas is a terrorist organization that has a history of authoritarian control, rape, murder, and no framework for respecting any individual rights at all, you bow to the most draconian interpretation of Islamic law or you die.
People generally don't even understand what the term "free Palestine" means, even without the "From the river to the sea" part. It's not a call for an independent Palestinian state. It's a call for a Palestinian state where Israel stands.
And we all know how that would end for just about all non-Arab Israelis.
> When the terrorist organizations chant "From the river to the sea" they are clearly calling for the forced removal (at best) of all Jews from the land.
Hamas members chanting "from the river to the sea" most certainly have genocidal intent, yes. Saying "from the river to the sea" alone - as the Likud document pretty clearly shows - doesn't make you a Hamas member nor a terrorist. There are a lot of attempts to conflate "Palestinian === Hamas", but that's sleight of hand.
I'm all for wiping out Hamas. I'm quite dubious about the possibility of doing so via armed conflict.
> A political party that calls for "Israeli sovereignty between the Sea and the Jordan" it is clearly a rejection of the "2 state solution" but that is not a call for the removal of an ethnic population from the region.
Maybe, but it's certainly a call for an un-free Palestine.
"Free Palestine",as with other short slogans (see: BLM, Defund), encompasses a range of opinions. Both genocide and the two-state solution fall squarely within it.
>>There are a lot of attempts to conflate "Palestinian === Hamas"
if they did not want to be conflated than perhaps they should have accepted one of the 5 2 state solutions proposed by mutiple parties over the decades.
Contrary to your claims I do not believe Palestinian's desire a 2 state solution in any form, instead they rejected every attempt by the UN, Britain, even the Saudi's then elected Hamas to be their official government when Israel pulled out of Gaza and allowed them to self govern...
Sorry if I press F for Doubt that they want a peaceful co-existence with Israel
It is also telling that no other Muslim nation will accept Palestinian refugees, Not Jordan, not Egypt, not even Iran...
>>Maybe, but it's certainly a call for an un-free Palestine.
Correct, it is signalling that after decades of attempted compromise that maybe a 2 state solution is not really possible. This is setting aside the fact that in reality there was already a 2 state solution where by British Mandate "Palestine" was split in 2, Jordan and Israel. However in the old adage of given in inch take a mile more was demanded...
All offers for peace have been rejected by Palestine not Israel..
Even right now, a cease fire can be easily achieved if Hamas Surrenders Unconditionally, and Free's all hostages... Hell I bet a 2 state solution would even be on the table even after all of that
I bet it would Palestine not Israel that would reject said 2 state solution.
> Contrary to your claims I do not believe Palestinian's desire a 2 state solution in any form, instead they rejected every attempt by the UN, Britain, even the Saudi's then elected Hamas to be their official government when Israel pulled out of Gaza and allowed them to self govern...
"The Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat immediately embraced the initiative. His successor Mahmoud Abbas also supported the plan and officially asked U.S. President Barack Obama to adopt it as part of his Middle East policy. Islamist political party Hamas, the elected government of the Gaza Strip, was deeply divided, with most factions rejecting the plan. The Israeli government under Ariel Sharon rejected the initiative as a "non-starter" because it required Israel to withdraw to pre-June 1967 borders. In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed tentative support for the Initiative, but in 2018, he rejected it as a basis for future negotiations with the Palestinians."
> if they did not want to be conflated than perhaps they should have accepted one of the 5 2 state solutions proposed by mutiple parties over the decades.
2002 above was the last concrete proposal. Half of Gaza is under 18; they've never even had the opportunity to do so.
> In a world where several thousand people have just been killed by an internationally funded terrorist group, I think scrutiny on groups which are (a) armed and (b) make political statements is probably justified.
Eh. I can only assume parent is referring to negative media search most financial institutions do as part of their 'know your customer' barrage of acronyms. From that perspective, anything you do that ends up on the internet and is part of a cause, could be considered political and banks do do periodic re-assessments of risk.
> If a bank has 1M accounts, regulators want to see a certain number of SAR/CTR filings, a certain number of account closures; regulators go hard on financial institutions, if the latter don't follow the industry average (#SARs, #CTRs, #closures)
Oh lord, this just asks for gamification.
If there's a multi-million dollar customer and a five thousand dollar customer, who do you reckon they'd rather lose in order to reach their quotas?
Regulators fine big banks for "weak controls". To show that they have "strong controls", they have to show quantitative data. Now, every bank is engaged in one-upmanship. Since we don't have data on the number of account closures, we should look at SAR/CTR statistics provided by FinCen. Every year, SAR numbers go up by 20%; that's because banks fill SARs with "transaction with no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose". Just gamify SAR reports with vague stuff.
Do you have evidence such quotas exist or that banks are competing on SAR numbers? This all seems like wild conjecture if there's nothing to back it up.
https://www.bankersonline.com/ is a place where people working for banks in BSA compliance, hang out. Based on my reading of that forum, there is a push from BSA auditors to file more and more SARs. Also, anon comments like the following from an old NYT article validate what I see publicly on bankersonline dot com. Also look at another poster's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38158017
"Banks are under tremendous pressure by regulators to file a certain amount of SARS (as a ratio of overall transaction activity, which is determined by the regulator - regulators have a secret bogey for each bank). A shortfall from the number expected by the regulators for a bank will result in the bank being penalized by the regulator as having an inadequate BSA program (even if the bank compliance staff reviewed the activity and didn’t find anything worth SAR reporting on). If the bank fights this censure for not filing enough SARs the arbiter of justice is the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) department of the FDIC or OCC. They rule in favor of the regulators over 99% of the time.) For example California Pacific Bank- a tiny bank serving the Chinese trading community with 200 customers and 500 accounts - was persecuted for more than 5 years for not filing enough SARs, it’s hearing with the ALJ is on YouTube. Even though racist anti Chinese comments by the regulators were unearthed in depositions, the ALJ ruling still went against the bank. Furthermore, banks are required to review ongoing activity of SAR’d customers and file follow up SARs if the “typology” of suspicious activity continues. Bank BSA policies have the requirement that repeat SAR subjects will need to have their accounts closed. Most banks therefore just file SARS on anything that matches a typology and close accounts- that’s just how the BSA regulatory system works.” [1]
Goddam fuck that's depressing. Putting the BS into BSA.
No wonder shit doesn't work the way it should. Reporting on numbers and percentages rather than actual incidences with audit trails leading to shell companies and tax havens and opaque offshore ownership structures.
Because that takes time and effort that meaningless "numbers and percentages" don't require whatsoever.
Automation scaling is the jackboot stamping on the human face.
> Regulators want to see a certain number of SAR and CTR filings
I didn't experience that when I was on board of directors.
In my personal affairs I had a checking account force closed because of their auditors - not the regulators. Rumors and myths about enforcement have internal people and contractor (compliance software) going too far. No recourse individually on this behavior.
My close friend was scammed via interac and bank closed his account, cards, and he was banned from interac even though he was the one that got scammed. Bitcoin solves that, but Bitcoin has another issue why banks win - if you are scammed with your card - you get your money back or if you forget password - you still have your money, if you are scammed with Bitcoin - you basically lose, if you forget your password - you lose. Just depends on what spectrum you are.
Banned from Interac? They won't let them get a debit card again through any bank/credit union? Or won't let them ever send email money transfers? Won't let them ever receive email money transfers?
(Interac is the Canadian debit card system, owned by a network of banks, which has also branched out into person-to-person money transfers between bank accounts because we don't have Venmo/Zelle/etc here).
You don’t have an ombudsman? Or something like that? Here in India we can even make them sing exact reason for rejecting credit card applications and if they just did it shoddily then they have to actually issue it. They just can’t say “internal policy” or shit like “discretion”.
Same thing in New Zealand. If you can't get something worked out with your bank you complain to the ombudsman and the bank must respond. Sometimes, even the mention of a potential ombudsman complaint is enough to grease the wheels.
In some a case going to the Ombudsman costs the bank regardless of the outcome.
In the UK the first three cases in a year are free, but from the fourth onward the bank has to pay £750 [1]. It doesn't matter the outcome is - the customer could be totally innocent or the next Bernie Madoff - the bank has to pay. A customer saying "I will get the Ombudsman involved" is heard by the bank as "if we don't make this go away right now, we will get charged £750 (plus any compensation the Ombudsman may award)". It does tend to make them sit up and take notice, I hear, presumably because banks get a lot of complaints and so a large bill.
I feel sacking customers got really popular during Covid and continued after.
Many phone systems have a thinly veiled threat about zero tolerance policies, to treat staff with respect, and in the case of certain government agencies here in the UK, that they will refer cases to the police. The same is repeated on written posters in eg doctors and dentist offices
Just a coincidence I’m sure but I find employees (especially on the phone) even more condescending and unhelpful these days
Earlier, banks used to warn customers at least once for any disrespect towards employees. Now, expect big banks and financial institutions to close accounts without any warning, unless you are a wealthy client. Charles Schwab and Chase do that.
Yes, they can. At least with credit unions, they can call you for clarifications when they or their system flags your transactions suspicious. With big banks, once they find your transactions suspicious, they will send a notice to close your accounts. No human being can help you.
> If they don't like you, they can close your account by simply stating that "we have an obligation to know our customers; after careful consideration, we decided to close your account".
What's really behind the decision is simply risk avoidance. It's like "firing" bad customers. The banks consider it prudent business to kick anyone who might be a problem out the door. Avoiding one criminal causing issues is worth kicking out 20 ordinary honest customers.
> Banks hide behind Bank Secrecy Act and other regulations in order to debank people.
Banks do what the government tells them to do.
They are more than happy to launder drug money, they don't care. You think they close the account of some random person who made too many cash deposits to protect themselves from the customer?
No, they protect themselves from the government who will hit them with massive fines when they "fund terrorism".
I'd be curious to know, raincom, did your purchasing history visible to Chase include ammo, firearms, donations to Trump or MAGA politicians, supplies for building an off-grid homestead?
It is wonderful to hear politicians and the UN speak of our wonderful human rights, but clearly that does not extend to our ability to trade our skills, good and services in a legal manner, in our common currencies.
Now how is that for our much vaunted human rights?
Is anyone going to propose a constitutional amendment that makes banking a human right not subject to the whims and caprices of anonymous secretive unaccountable govt and banking officials?
Of course we could trade in cash, at the risk of having some "law enforcement" officials seizing our cash and asking us to prove we acquired it legally, subject to time wasting and expensive legal process which usually costs more than the amount seized. Habeas corpus doesn't apply to the cash which is why the court cases read State of New York vs $28,777 rather than State of New York vs John Doe.
In the EU some countries have placed limits on the size of payments which can be made in cash.
As for the US one has to wonder why the $10000 deposit notification limit which was made in 1970 has not been adjusted to account for inflation, which according to Google it is about $79,000 in 2023.
Those officials must have been ecstatic at the introduction of computers which makes tracking such transactions so easy.
Anyone to campaign for the adjustment of the $10000 figure to account for inflation? We want to party!!
Think of how it would improve the liquidity of banks. So much money would come flowing in in full knowledge that it wouldn'tbe subject to needless checks from nosy make busy bank and IRS officials.
However wrong the EU is on many things, at least the EU states that having a "basic bank account" is a right in the EU that cannot be denied: "If you are legally resident in an EU country you are entitled to open a "basic payment account". Banks cannot refuse your application for a basic payment account just because you don't live in the country where the bank is established.". [1]
And the European Convention on Human Rights has some implication on banks in the EU, for example when they lend money (say for a mortgage) to an EU citizen.
I'd say that that's better than a country where you can be totally de-banked and blocklisted.
I don't have any false hope but it's at least better than nothing.
Debanking is deeply unfair but more so in our society that is moving increasingly towards a cash-less society. A person can be debanked for no fault of their own and that causes them to be unable to pay rent, bills, etc. Like being arrested - there is little recourse without great expense or effort.
There's a very obvious utility in the US which should be able to prevent this: The US Postal Service.
It's federally required to exist, and services all Americans already. Basic banking services should be one of the things it is expanded to provide in a minimal, safe fashion (i.e. no loans or lending, but guaranteed electronic banking and funds transfer services).
Exactly, that's a non-starter for a whole pile of essential services. Which makes homelessness very easy to fall into but extremely hard to work your way back out of.
Post office should offer free services for receiving and holding mail for up to 30 days. Not necessarily a P.O. box, as there's limited space for that, but something they can get for you during business hours. Would significantly help the homeless and van-lifers.
New Zealand Post wants to shut its last 79 shops, but will not say when the last branch will close its doors
New Zealand Post said the move from stand-alone stores was old news and 801 of its 880 stores were already franchised.
Franchised means the branch has closed as a dedicated Post Office.
Kiwibank originally had branches at the Post Offices.
Kiwibank is left with much less branches than there were Post Offices - branches often replaced by ATMs in the wall: it has "325 Kiwibank Limited Branch and ATM Locations" https://kiwibank.banklocationmaps.co.nz/en/nzl
I presume it will take much longer in the USA for the Post Offices to close. There is no reason something similar won't happen there - the same economic forces occur in the USA.
Note that most franchises are an in-store counter or small area set aside for the Post Office supplies. I can think of franchises in book-stores, stationery shops, pharmacies, and even a public library. I know of one Post Office branch of that 79 that remains open, however it is mostly run by unpaid volunteers including a friend of mine (no banking counter).
> guaranteed electronic banking and funds transfer services
That alone exceeds the requirement of “minimal” as there’s now a need to hire staff for fraud monitoring, handle disputed transactions, chase fraudulent transfers, deal with those who forgot their passwords to electronic banking, had their passwords stolen, etc.
What are the new revenue channels that will pay for all that extra staff (and considering it’s USPS, their pensions)?
>What are the new revenue channels that will pay for all that extra staff (and considering it’s USPS, their pensions)?
The federal government, unlike most other entities, does not need to match new revenue to new spending. It can and does create new money for any spending it deems worth it.
Funding basic banking for all through the USPS is worth it.
Well, the usual answer should be boring old taxes, not inflation, if you want to finance something that user fees don't cover. Just like it's done for nearly every other government programme?
Today's inflation was caused by greedy market forces, collusion, and government loan fraud, by those same capitalists.
Government spending on useful services, or helping their constituents get by on two one-time $600 payments did not create the current economic climate.
So you believe government only ever spends on Useful services? Some how I bet you can point to more than a few things government spends money on you disapprove of and consider to be less than useful
>>helping their constituents get by on two one-time $600 payments did not create the current economic climate.
Nice gas lighting, the reality is the 2 $600 payments make up something on the order of like 1% of covid spending, and I have a problem with all of it. Not just the direct payments.
That said it my be a shock to you that in some ways, to some people, I dont believe the government paid enough, not because I have this false narrative that somehow it is government job to help people "get by" it is not. However it is their responsibility under the 5th and other amendments to the US Constitution to compensate people when they take property. Shutting down the entire economy, barring people from working, and barring people from engaging in "non-essential" commerce should be viewed as a taking and thus require the government to make everyone whole from which they took.
now of course I also believe the government massively over stepped its authority and should have never shut down the economy, and does not have the power to do any of the things it did...
>>collusion, and government loan fraud,
Those are illegal activities, where is your government in prosecuting them? Ohh that is right they do not prosecute crimes anymore I forgot. How is that defund the police movement working out....
I'm gonna step past the conflation and other poor discussion to focus on the part I like in your post.
Things would have gone better if the PPP loan money was spent on keeping the working public solvent. People who weren't allowed to work shouldn't have been forced into unemployment, more or less, without adequate compensation.
But I also see the whole thing as evidence that our viral protocols and our ability to deliver clear, accurate information that won't be politicized, is essentially moot.
If it were rabies that was this airborne, we'd all be dead.
Does a car with 4 wheels exceed requirements of minimal? Who operates a payment service without handling fraud? Can you operste a postal service without handling fraud?
> pay for all that extra staff?
Do roads create revenue?
Like you are fee to argue that its not worth it, but government services do not need to charge fees, rhey can create economic growth and get the money back through taxes
> Does a car with 4 wheels exceed requirements of minimal?
I mean, yes? 3 should be enough without too many design changes. 2 with a kick stand. Even 1 with tech that absolutely cannot fail or else catastrophic failure.
Worth mentioning that they are already involved in the financial anti-fraud business by way of postal money orders, and are already involved in electronic support by way of the very many services they already offer online. Very little of this proposal is entirely new to them.
There is no requirement that the service be revenue-neutral.
I don’t see the connection between the Postal Service and banking. Is it just it was historically there? If that’s the case, you could attach it to any department.
It used to provide some limited banking services up until the 60s and it still does billions of dollars worth of money orders a year so a lot of the infrastructure is still there.
banking does sometimes require actual money still, much more so if you're poorer. What's another institution that has offices everywhere, ships things every day, and privately and securely stores things for huge numbers of customers? Remember, DMVs/RMVs are state-level.
Hell, they're even surprisingly used to keeping large amounts of valuable paper safe. It wasn't that long ago that you could make a lot of money stealing stamp sheets.
> What's another institution that has offices everywhere, ships things every day, [...]
Walmart or 7-11 or so? Jokes aside, giving banking licenses to retailers might be a sensible thing to do. (Or removing the whole system of banks requiring licenses altogether would be even better.)
"At its more than 4,600 in-store MoneyCenters, as well as online, millions of customers have access to basic, low-cost banking services, including the ability to withdraw cash, make deposits, and pay bills."
History not withstanding The reason people talk about the post office is a bank is because it has physical branches in just about every community in the country. More so than any other federal organization, and it is designed to serve all citizens on a frequent basis versus other federal organizations that might deal with citizens on a much less frequent basis.
> I don’t see the connection between the Postal Service and banking. Is it just it was historically there? If that’s the case, you could attach it to any department.
Before the FDIC was created to cover bank runs & closures, the USPS was proposed to expand into being a postal savings system, a system that was already done by the UK beforehand & had proven to work.
Many countries have postal savings systems, often very significant. The first was in the UK, 1861.[1] In the US, existed 1911 - 1967, started in the wake of the Panic of 1907.[2] The Japan Post Bank is among the largest savings institutions worldwide.[3] France's La Poste Group website[4] highlights "eliminating banking customer refusal" and provides an extensive suite of services.
The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, explicitly gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." A few lines earlier the same article grants Congress the power "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States." Would it then seem odd for the Congress to be assumed to have the power to create postal bonds, so common in much of the world?
[Addendum]
Might not be such a stretch then to imagine a Postal Savings System or something similar with great reach in the US, potentially encompassing much of what commercial banks handle today. The advantages including stability and availability, and perhaps even efficiency. Perhaps Hyman Minsky might have wished for things to... go postal?
In New Zealand the bank that provides government departments with banking is required to provide "banking of last resort" facilities to people, even going so far as people who have (for example) done bank fraud. The facilities are minimal - no overdrafts or credit cards, obviously! - but provide enough to function in a society where cheques don't exist and cash is rarely used.
Canada has a funny approach: banks can pretty much close an account willy-nilly but they're also required to open up a basic bank account to anyone that can properly prove their identity. Not sure how far anyone has pushed that envelope.
Funny thing is Finnish Posti (ex. Itella) kinda does it. They have online service where you sometimes get your mail "scanned" before it actually arrives. Probably due to them actually printing it (in better quality somehow?) and delivering to you.
My job is to help immigrants settle in Germany. This is a serious issue for a lot of immigrants.
The documents they need to open a bank account (plastic residence permit, address registration certificate) are not available to them, sometimes for up to a year.
The ways around it are poorly documented and change often as German banks tighten their KYC requirements.
When once I was deregistered from an address (Abmeldung), the German bank instantly went apeshit hysterical with "Are you American?" letters. At least half dozen of them ignoring all of my previous responses or feedback. Of course I have nothing to do with US and none of my personal details indicate that I do, I'm fully EU person.
Indeed. US citizens moving to the EU regularly run into the fact that their citizenship makes it much harder to get a bankaccount (and sometimes even impossible). It's probably the biggest driver in people giving up their US citizenship (that and the ridiculous taxation rules).
Everyone here is not seeing the elephant in the room. No country will implement KYC on foreign money. It's free money. Yet, we live in world where pretty much every country requires a residence (and a dozen other documents) to open a bank account except, uhm, the USA.
I find the money transfer system created in Malaysia to be interesting. It started as a transfer system between banks, then an e-wallet that you can use to pay in stores, then they added a Visa card, then they integrated with Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand where you can pay locally with your MYR wallet. Now they added a remittance service that basically acts as a SWIFT transfer (though it looks expensive). It seems like they have found a way around the KYC rules. I wonder how long they can keep at it before they get hammered and if they can increase their Fx integrations to more countries.
Some are, some are not. The US tax reporting requirements for their citizens abroad made a lot of banks refuse American customers.
But there are also other requirements that are not related. The most effective workaround at the moment is to choose a EU bank outside of Germany. This skips the requirement for a residence permit or a registered address, so people can land in Germany with a functional bank account.
Another workaround is to rely on branch employees to be a little pragmatic and let immigrants open an account. These exceptions are naturally impossible to document, but they are a normal part of German bureaucracy.
A third and last workaround a symbiotic relationship between a relocation consultant and a bank employee. They expedite the process and in return they get a steady stream of high-income customers.
This was and remains an important USP for cryptocurrencies. Security in one's ability to pay for goods and services is incredibly important for any currency. In Canada, the government effectively de-banked hundreds of people and froze their funds for participating in and donating to the trucker protest. As more and more people experience this loss of liberty, the need for free and secure transaction methods will grow. Governments and companies are becoming more oppressive, not less. For this reason, I see cryptocurrencies as inevitable. Eventually cash will be eliminated, and this will only leave cryptocurrencies.
For the record, I am far from a "crypto bro." I understand all of their limitations, including high volatility. I am arguing that their value is quickly growing in relation to their risks.
Indeed. I've sent money to more than one individual over time that had no way of receiving it other than crypto. For instance, when you're homeless or in some third world country crypto may well be your only option (that, and WU but they're outrageously expensive and inconvenient).
>I see cryptocurrencies as inevitable. Eventually cash will be eliminated, and this will only leave cryptocurrencies.
Except, unless cryptocurrencies are tied to some brain implant so you cant lose the keys. There will be a need for a custodian for the average joe's key...and banks 2.0 here we come.
I agree, and I think banks 2.0 are already here: exchanges. Some of them offer credit cards, loans, leverage, investing, and savings accounts already. The catch is that they're largely unregulated, so I see a lot of people opting to keep their cryptocurrency in personal wallets. Like cash, if you lose your wallet, you lose your currency. So people might have a hardware wallet at home in a safe, and one which they top up when they do their shopping each day. In fact, wallets are safer than cash because currency can be retrieved if they're well designed. Bitcoin wallets, for example, merely hold a key to one's funds in the cloud. That key can be shared with multiple devices. Many offer retrieval methods using pass-phrases, which can be stored electronically or printed and kept in a safe or deposit box, for example.
I'm not claiming crypto is better or more convenient today than banks. At least not for most people. My premise is that they will become more valuable over time relative to their risks and limitations.
Do you really think crypto will become the default currency and governments will take no steps to restrict and regulate transactions in exactly the same way they do with cash?
I don't think it will ever become a default currency for modern nations. I think it will be used for parallel economies, which will expand. People will be able to buy more and more goods and services with crypto. Many more services will be set up to facilitate the conversation from USD, for example, to BTC. The scale of these parallel economies will depend on the lengths to which governments attempt to stifle freedoms. As they become more egregious, more and more people will opt to be paid in cryptocurrencies, and shop at places which accept it. There are many ways governments can and will clamp down on cryptocurrencies, but there are even more ways to achieve circumvention.
The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be. It could however be a technique used to hide things that are criminal like fraud or theft. Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction. "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be.
The way you actually prosecute theft and fraud is by looking at the ledger of transactions to see what happened. Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions more difficult. Because it hides the evidence of theft or fraud, we criminalize it the same way we'd criminalize theft or fraud, because it's far easier to prove the cover-up than the actual crime. Furthermore, once you've shown evidence of a cover-up, that creates suspicion to start dissolving privacy to prove the actual crime. Dragnet surveillance is illegal[0], but surveillance with reasonable suspicion is not.
In the counterfactual world where money laundering is explicitly legal, crime becomes far harder to prove, the government is far less useful at stopping crime, and people spend more of their time inventing parallel structures to stop crime that are far less accountable than the government is, until we've sleep-walked into anarchocapitalism.
None of this excuses 'debanking' of course. In the case of debanking, you aren't being accused of the crime of money laundering, the bank just thinks you might be, so they summarily execute your account in the same way that Google executes[1] spammers. The thing you need to be angry about is the weaponization of freedom to associate, and you need to be calling for common carrier regulation rather than legalizing financial crime.
[0] Theoretically, at least - the CIA and NSA have fought tooth and nail to get full take, which is disgusting
[1] Metaphorical, at least until 2035 when Google starts livestreaming executions of known spammers
"Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions [ones that prove you committed a crime] more difficult."
But that's not true. If it's not a deliberate attempt to hide fraud/theft but otherwise looks like actual money laundering, then it is still a crime, at least according to current KYC/AML laws. That's the real problem with this all. That's what makes the debanking problem (which you agree is bad) so easily ignored by law makers and law enforcement.
> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction.
Totally wrong direction.
> "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be.
This goes back to this weird fetishism where people think it was oh-so-cool to arrest and convict Al Capone for "not paying taxes" instead of convicting him for his actual crimes.
A society which thinks its cool to send people to jail for tax evasion instead of sending them to jail for organized crime is a failed society.
Prohibition-era USA was, if not failed, at least a failing society. There was by this point pretty widespread public corruption and general lack of respect for the law.
Anyway, wasn't the tax evasion also an actual crime? It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?
> It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?
Tax evasion is what did Al Capone in. Because the bar to prove that he was involved in a lot of seriously criminal activity was quite high, but proving that he committed tax only required proving that he had undeclared income.
This society sends people to jail for tax evasion all the time, even if the original source of their income was non-criminal.
Al Capone was guilty of running a massive criminal organisation responsible for many many crimes (very difficult to prove due to structures of organised crime). He was also guilty of massive tax evasion (a crime carrying serious jail time), because it turns out it's hard to pay the right tax bill when you're trying to hide the income from your massive criminal enterprise.
The Capone tax case wasn't some made up crime to try pin him. He committed serious tax evasion, which would also carry severe penalties if you or I did it at that scale with legitimate income.
Again, how exactly do you define money laundering? Currently the definition by law seems to be, "anything that could be used to hide criminal activity." In that case, yes, there are plenty of legitimate, non-criminal reasons to make transactions that "could be used" to hide criminal activity. Is privacy a crime?
I'm pretty sure money laundering at least requires intent.
Doing anything to intentionally avoid triggering scrutiny policies is a crime, even if you're not doing anything else wrong.
Unfortunately, we run into the same problems as DMCA where hugely powerful, essential corporations run into poorly crafted laws that don't function at scale, and small users that never did anything wrong get shafted.
I have a right to privacy, and a right for my actions to be free from government scrutiny until, at the very minimum, they can show probable cause with a search warrant.
Deputizing the banks to spy on me just makes those banks obligated to the same rules.
Money laundering is a crime predicated on the idea that the money I rightfully own is something they should be able to confiscate from me on hypothetical crimes, and they're attempts to seize it often cause people to try to make it less suspicious to the government. It's bizarre.
If they wanted to fight organized crime, the simple way was always to legalize cocaine, meth, and heroin, and sell that shit out of liquor stores in plain retail packages, all manufactured by regulated pharmaceutical companies that would produce it for a fixed, low profit-over-cost, in measured doses and free from unsafe adulterants.
Government causes problems with bad laws, blames the problems on the criminals, then makes more bad laws to punish them for it, causing more problems. As it is now, it's illegal for you to own and possess cash, though they tend to ignore it as long as you don't keep any in tempting amounts (typically less than $1000).
For example, I was living and working in Ukraine and without some sort of.. let's call it instruments... I would not have been able to get my money in the clear and legal into the western bank. Because obviously all money earned in Ukraine could only be made criminally, no way a ukrainian programmer could earn some. Must be a criminal.
One western bank even told me in private: "we do understand stealing a train of coal and laundering bribes from Ukraine, this is common and the risk is clear for us; but we have no idea about your IT stuff and things, it scares us".
Of course, it's getting easier today in some ways but good luck exporting any substantial amount of money from Ukraine into the world and in the clear. Practically impossible without some help of money laundering services.
Now I expect to be downvoted to hell because the everyday reality of being from a third-world country is incomprehensible to American people so it must be me in the wrong.
> we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime
I'm not event sure that we, as a society, actually did decide that. When, how? Was there a vote, a referendum? I cannot speak for everyone, but to me it feels like we as a society sure as fuck didn't decide anything. Yes, somebody decided that, but we as a society never were a part of the conversation, really.
We as a society have allowed our elected representatives to pass laws that empowered unelected bureaucrats to write reams of regulations that require banks to do these things, all in the name of "security". It's not going to change unless and until we the people give our elected representatives different incentives.
> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime.
It’s not criminalized. If it were, you’d go to jail instead of just having your account closed.
The real problem is that politicians made banks liable if an account is used for laundering, so naturally banks terminate accounts that look suspicious in order to avoid getting fined.
> The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be.
Nothing crazy about it. All those KYCs, checks and check on checks have nothing to do with money laundering or any other sort of illegal activity but it has to do with control over YOUR money.
Notice how extremely regulated the industry is? So multi-billion dollar scam ventures just can't exist under this pressure, right? Multi billion dollar dodgy deals with money laundering? They should have disappeared if my $500 txn gets so much attention, right?
Wrong - it's blossoming. One may ask how - and the answer is on the surface and it has nothing to do with money laundering.
Your own link says that they may decline cash payments.
United States currency is legal for all debts public and private (it says so on the notes), but that doesn't mean it's required to be accepted for all debts.
But a restaurant bill generally isn't going to be a 'debt' in that sense... if they only take credit cards and you don't have one after already eating your food, they're just going to write it off and ban you from the premises.
In my experience, they will direct you to the ATM on premises to get some cash. If you have neither cash nor a card to get cash, the police will be called.
I imagine if the restaurant staff called the police and claimed you were refusing to pay for your meal, and your defense was “but I offered them cash”, then that would actually be a pretty good defense. It’s hard to imagine the cops siding with the restaurant and arresting you for theft.
So I think you’re right, even though it sounds like a minor distinction.
I am unsure what distinction the linked page is trying to draw between payment for goods/services and debt. The first paragraph seems to unequivocally state that businesses do not need to accept cash (from a Federal law perspective anyway).
There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an
organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.
Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept
cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.
I know a few coffee shops that were robbed so they stopped accepting cash. That was a much safer option for employees. But your point is still valid, there just isn't a better alternative right now, sadly.
Conversely some restaurants in my city are cash only and I either avoid them or order pickup through delivery apps so they can take a hit on the app comission. I despise using cash.
Capital One used to have a cafe near Boston Commons, although they accepted all card networks. I think it would be pretty neat if they opened coffee shops sponsored by CC companies that only accept their CC customers (e.g. coffee shops that only accept Visa or only accept Amex).
Protip to anybody who wants to spend an extended amount of time overseas - you’re looking at a strong opportunity to join the list of people who have their accounts closed. Red flags include quantity of overseas debit card transactions, setting a PO Box (this one apparently is a very big red flag to banks) or a PMB as your bank address, lots of wire transfers.
Open multiple bank accounts at different banks, use services like wise.com for transfers, and limit your overseas spending with American cards to only a credit card issued with a bank that isn’t the same as your primary accounts.
Yay, patriot act. Glad we have so much energy focusing on legit bankers instead of the crypto that is actually funding multiple US adversaries at this very moment
Crypto has been a scam from the beginning, the only thing that's changed is the public perception after NFTs bombed massively and crypto was once again left without any use case.
Depends on where you live, if you live in Zimbabwe suddenly it starts to look very attractive. Too many countries play fast and loose with their currency.
Hey you dumb fuck, try living in a third world country and you'll find the use case real fast. Actually, you'll find out either way beause USA will collapse soon.
> on balance detrimental to society relatively recently
Let's not forget Crypto mining has a not insignificant energy footprint, and is a driver of climate change. Really, detrimental to society from the get-go.
Patriot Act expired, no? Also, I've stayed abroad for a year or more and I just swapped the address to a friend's home. Kept my Google Fi, etc. and used my credit cards all internationally alone. I think I visited the US like once in a year and it was fine for the rest of the time. I lost my phone and actually activated my Google Fi SIM from abroad too (needed to use a Wireguard tunnel to the US).
That started only recently, around 2020ish. If you don't use the data (basic plan) and access your sms and vms via a web page using a VPN, you are ok (first hand experience, expat in EU)
Staying overseas, I also got my account locked last month when I invoiced a consulting client. Seemingly out of nowhere because the previous 22 invoices cleared without an issue. But I am properly set up for this. We initiated a refund, and then I invoiced them through another EU business I set up just for this type of scenario. Then I issued a B2B invoice to my business in Europe, from my LLC in Asia; which then paid it out to me as a salary. Fees are steep, but tax is low; so that balances out.
If you're still an American citizen, don't you technically still owe US to taxes on that "salary"? And since you're paying it as salary, I'm not sure that you're able to deduct any of the fees as expenses from what's owed.
The foreign tax credit is provided to prevent the double tax burden when your foreign source income is taxed by both the United States and the foreign country.
You just submit that you already paid taxes on that income to a foreign government and then no additional US taxes (to a limit, I beleive).
It's not that simple. There are a lot more details, but at a minimum you will still need to pay US taxes to the extent that the foreign government taxes at a lower rate. You'll also often still need to pay state income taxes.
The answer depends on how your specific state defines tax residency (for example California is notoriously difficult to escape).
Generally the rules will be something like you remain a tax resident of your old state, regardless of how long you stay abroad, until you establish a new permanent tax residency (whether in a new state or country).
What I eventually did is return to the US, sign a 1 month lease in Florida so I could get a drivers license and register to vote, and then return abroad. According to my tax accountant, that was enough.
Americans abroad shouldn't pay taxes (since they get basically no benefits) or vote (why should those who live abroad affect the laws they are, largely, not subject to?)
Americans abroad get a very valuable guarantee though. If shit hits the fan the full force of the US Military and Government is around to help out. They also are a last resort for Americans in emergencies abroad. Emergency assistance, flights and travel back home, etc.
It's not like we give up everything but leaving the country.
It's not much of a guarantee when it depends on the administration in charge. Recent debacles come to mind first, but the willingness of the government to help (in particular, with your mention of the military) is extremely variable.
And your citizenship allows you to get visas/dual citizenships that you wouldn't have access to if you weren't an American citizen. An American passport is pretty valuable, even if you don't live in America.
This is all less relevant if you move to, say, the EU, but it's still worth noting.
What qualifies as an "extended amount of time overseas"? If you go on a vacation for 6-8 weeks, does that get you in trouble? I would think banks would want to keep big spenders who can afford months-long international travel.
A single retail account is of no consequence to a national bank that has tens of millions of customers. It doesn't matter if you're spending $10 or $50,000 a month. They care about you as an individual about as much as Google cares about a single Gmail account. If an algorithm flags you as potential trouble, off you go.
If you want better service, there are two ways. One is to be an ultra high net worth individual. But the threshold for that is pretty high - from what I recall, real private banking nowadays starts around $5M to 10M in assets with a single institution. The term "millionaire" doesn't mean as much as it did in the 1990s.
The other option is to go with a small local bank or a credit union. If you're in a CU with 10,000 members, it's a lot easier to resolve problems or discuss unique circumstances.
For pseudo private banking, HSBC Premier is decent if you travel often to Europe or Asia. They are basically Wise for HNWs with a dash of money laundering thrown in.
Looks like they have a $50 monthly account maintenance fee, unless you have $75k on deposit, a qualifying mortgage, or $5k in monthly direct deposit. I guess the latter is the easiest, but this is significantly more onerous than any bank I've looked at.
You get priority support for telephone banking and you get a dedicated account manager (not sure if it's a fully accredited banker). You are automatically classified as one of the highest tiered customers for them and can get preferred rates etc. on many other services. Aside from HNW individuals, they also traditionally cater to "expats", which is a fancy British word for high income white collar professionals/digital nomads who either travel frequently or have foreign residencies for business. Your Premier status is global; you can easily create accounts at overseas branches with the same Premier privileges and (possibly credit history transfer too) and fund transfers between accounts are free, though I believe their conversion rates are not necessarily as competitive as a proper brokerage like Interactive Brokers. HSBC's premier service has been around long before the likes of Transferwise.
HSBC operates a bit like a franchise, each country's branch has to abide by domestic regulations but internally customers with Premier status are basically VIPs and get expedited during account opening at overseas branches. If I remember correctly, they generally take into account all of your assets with the bank including e.g. loans and mortgages etc. when banking. They don't only look at your cash assets when conferring Premier status. So if you have a house or car loan with them you can easily attain Premier.
> they also traditionally cater to "expats", which is a fancy British word for high income white collar professionals/digital nomads who either travel frequently or have foreign residencies for business.
"Expats" is also used for elderly retirees moving to the Costa Del Sol, so IME it's not a particularly high-income or white-collar term.
Now, if you were talking about "non-doms" that would be a different matter :)
Of course, I agree that a bank accustomed to dealing with expatriates would probably be understanding of someone spending a lot of time in another country.
"non-doms" are rich foreigners in England (and the very rare Englishman who hasnt yet had the taxman rule on their attempt to pretend they are no longer English), immigrants are poor/average foreigners in England.
Expats are all English when they are outside the UK - be they retired in Spain or living / working in Dubai / Asia / Australia.
high net worth New Zealanders from a diverse range of backgrounds. Typically our clients have at least $1.5 million to invest, or significant lending with a personal annual income of $400,000 or more. *Additional income criteria may apply
Banks don't really have much choice in the matter. They have been deputized to enforce federal laws, and given penalties if they don't. To add a cherry on top, the laws are vague and require the bank to investigate, judge, and execute account closures.
That being said, if you know when are are leaveing,.where you are going, and when you will be home, you can often put a vacation note on your account, and then the bank will know you are on vacation. That is what I did when I spent this summer in Japan, using.my bank debit card because it has no foreign transaction fees, the whole time.
The point isn't necessarily to cut money laundering down to zero, it's to add significant cost and effort so it makes the cartels job harder. Every international border isn't airtight either and causes a bunch of hassle for travelers, but we don't throw up our hands and give up the idea of border control.
"... administration has ended the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocol, a policy that forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico as they await their court hearings, and has halted construction on a wall ..."
This is confusing. According to that article twenty miles will be built because present administration is unable to stop it.
"... building up to 20 miles of border wall because he has to. The administration said that it was bound to build this section of new wall because Congress already appropriated the funding to do so in 2019. It had been unsuccessful in convincing Congress to rescind the funding, Mr. Mayorkas said."
Seems other parts will not be built, and materials were sold off already.
I travel overseas a lot to Europe and Asia anywhere from a few weeks to almost a year. I VPN, but not always back to the US. I use wise.com. I kept my US address.
I’ve had zero problems. I think we’re all getting excited about anecdotes.
Indeed. As someone who lived overseas I knew plenty of people who maintained US accounts and US credit cards. The only time an issue ever came up is if they told the bank they no longer lived in the US. Then boom account closure.
I spent a year traveling in SE Asia circa 2012 and I didn’t have any problems with my bank account. n=1 and all that, and I didn’t have income coming from outside of the US, but I had countless ATM withdrawals and credit card spends.
The only time a compliance officer has been in touch with me was when I was moving money to crypto exchanges.
The compliance officer was following up with me I think because it looked like I was doing structured transactions, back when crypto exchange max ACH was $500/day. I did some explanation of crypto and he was like “so it’s for investment?” and that was it.
The big factor is whether you change your address or not.
Keep your US address on there and VPN (though frankly I’ve never needed to for anything other than Charles Schwab) and you often glide through unnoticed.
2023 is very different to 2012. I remember back in the day you can open a paypal account with only an email and receive/send money with it. No kyc required.
Problem because it's not supported or problem due to fraud prevention by amex? I've travelled a lot and never had issues with amex or chase (once I used my chase credit card for the first time in over a year on the opposite side of the world and the transaction was instantly approved).
I moved from the US to Yemen from 2006-2008. After I got the travel details figured out I realized I would need some way of getting money while I was there. Freaked out for a bit, figured that with the war on terror ongoing it would prove to be incredibly difficult.
Turns out my ATM card worked fine while I was over there. I did let the bank know I would be there and I kept my address in the US though. My card got locked at one point which was a disaster since it was strictly a cash economy. I put the card into an ATM that was apparently being serviced or something. I had to get on Skype (remember Skype?) to call my bank to straighten it out. Once they gave me the go ahead I tried the next day only to be denied again. Turned out Visa wanted to talk to me as well. Thankfully they did not cancel the card, I have no idea how I would have gotten a replacement.
Since I told the bank ahead of time that I was going to be going many places the ATM card worked all over the place: Yemen, Dubai, Qatar, Turkey, Greece, Malta… Everywhere except China lol. Had to use my credit card there.
I got put on a watch list during my time in Saudi and Abu Dhabi. Didnt affect my banking but every plane ticket i got for years had “SSSS”[0] printed/sharpied on it and all my luggage would get a secondary hand-search at every stop immediately pre-boarding both domestically and internationally.
I am just average white US citizen who was working on oil rigs but most likely some of my whatsapp/facebook/iMessage contacts were related to families involved in dissidence against the Saudi government (because the oil region of Saudi is populated by a minority Shia group that is severely underrepresented in governance). Their mosques also had individuals with mental health issues who occasionally try to bomb the mosques in a very, very similar parallel to school shooters back home here in USA.
Ah yes, I was wondering why NYT was reporting on this instead of Breitbart or perhaps Coindesk like you usually see, and it's probably because a bunch of people are about to get debanked for donating to various Palestine-related organizations.
That actually makes sense. I did wonder about the timing of this piece myself. No one cared until now ( even with SARs related to Biden and Trump the process was rarely in spotlight ).
However, this means that something changed with regards to perception of Palestine. My initial thought was that someone too important got banned from Chase.
I've heard when you get an SSSS ticket, you can make up some of the lost time by going to the first class security line. It's not like they're going to send you back to the regular line when it bings and alarms after they scan your ticket.
Heh, yeah. I was "randomly" pulled aside for extra security screenings every flight. To be fair, I later learned that I was going to the same Arabic language school that John Walker Lindh did. I managed to avoid doing what he did though lol.
> Glad we have so much energy focusing on legit bankers instead of the crypto that is actually funding multiple US adversaries at this very moment
Funny you criticize crypto, when it actually solves all the bullshit you're mentioning.
It's so nice knowing for a fact that when I send or receive crypto, it will 100% arrive within moments, unlike the absolute shitfest that is international transfers (like SWIFT).
Crypto today is the only way how you can take control of your own funds.
What use is the money in your Bank account if the ruling political party can label you an ultra-right extremist and retroactively lock all your money down, just because of a single 1$ donation you did to a cause you believed to be right, like Canada did?
There were a number of reports coming from conservative MPs of this very thing happening. Regardless of the veracity of their claims, the financial systems in place were able and prepared to do this, before the measures were lifted.
> Even a $20 donation to the Freedom Convoy after Feb. 15 could result in the donor’s bank accounts being frozen, a Commons committee heard Tuesday.
> can label you an ultra-right extremist and retroactively lock all your money down
Nitpick: about half the time (on sufficiently long term average), they'll instead label you a ultra-left extremist (most infamously anti-COMINTERN initiatives in the 1930s-1950s, but it tends to wobble back and forth depending on what's politically convenient).
I am always surprised how HN folks fall in hook line and sinker for Democratic talking points from senators FAR removed from any understanding of technology and insistent on curbing basic internet freedoms. The previous version of this was the proposal to ban encryption because bad actors can have a private conversation. If you oppose banning encryption but are in support of banning crypto, I would encourage folks to think more deeply about their positions
Because HN folks don't want to live in the anarcho-capitalist libertarian dystopia, where whole world "money" is controlled by a few criminals in the offshores, like Zhao, Giancarlo, Sun, Sam, Alex, etc. and by a small mining cartel controlling every transaction consisting mostly of the same people. They don't want to have their transactions blacklisted (like all those "tainted" bitcoins for example) and don't wasn't to be dependent on the centralized exchanges controlled by criminal, on on the decentralized exchanges also controlled by criminals and relying on shitty spaghetti code (just today Uniswap was exploited, but tokenbros don't write about it, interesting right?). They don't want to live a world where every single thing is monetized and rent is extracted forever by a few "early adopters" of said tokens.
Sure, there are problems with banks and goverment overreach, but those need to be fixed, not completely replaced with a worse alternative.
There is no better fix than Bitcoin. Banks and governments will always try to be fiscally irresponsible by removing a gold standard even if it were brought back. Bitcoin is the easiest way to impose rules on the system. Let me know what you think is a better alternative
Genuine observation incoming: I am always surprised how HN folks like yourself fall in hook line and sinker for party line politics, even here.
It's very hard for any layman to gleam even surface level tech info from the news, politicians etc. because any statements from politicians are by definition influenced by lobbyists.
Senator XXXX not understanding (or feigning ignorance) of a tech issue has nothing to do with the color tie the politician is wearing.
Democrats and republican parties are for-profit businesses that aren't a part of our constitution, and are lobbied by the tech industry to lie to you.This is all public information.
Fun fact I love to reiterate: Neither of the major party presidential candidates in 2016 knew how to use a desktop computer IE; windows, keyboard, mouse. But they both have made millions from investing in tech. But they would not know how to make a cursor move in windows 11. That should be a terrifying signal about our politicians and the effect they have on downstream tech-thought.
I can't edit my comment but happy to include Republicans too. The Democrats have been more vocal about Bitcoin lately but agreed they're all part of the lobby machine. I have no love for either party :)
The technology no, the tradfi companies that "use" it (aka custodial user funds) then yes, but those regulations exist since they're no different than any other financial product company.
For conversations sake I'm curious about specific evidence. It's also fun to consider which country or group of countries would provide the regulations and enforcement.
> Funny you criticize crypto [currency], when it actually solves all the bullshit you're mentioning.
Maybe if you're talking about Monero or another currency with the key security property of untraceability. Otherwise it's only a matter of time until cryptocurrency exchanges require documentation about the sources of money, which will likely resemble a parallel blockchain that carries wallet metadata.
Ah yes Crypto definitely solves all of the problems. Please ignore the rich men behind the curtains shutting down exchanges and stealing money, the numerous ways people have had crypto stolen from them or how volatile crypto is in general.
Technically, people wishing to use crypto as a bank account would care as much about the exchanges as a ‶normal″ bank customer should care about regulation enforcement on some random bookmaker; both run on [insert currency], but that's about it.
There should be more enforcement on dubious banking transactions, numerous Australian banks have had some big fines because they were literally facilitating money laundering on cartel-scale amounts of money for years. Makes me cringe when they crack down on a Joe Nobody who's obviously not, at even a quick glance, some kind of mule / druglord.
By crypto I'm assuming you mean USD.
Not only USD, but actual US weapons in the hands of US adversaries.
Last I heard, wise.com is outright stealing people's money now.
Otherwise, this is a good heads-up. Banking for expats can be tricky; a lot of US financial institutions don't want to service customers who live overseas, and will automatically cancel your account if they find out you don't live in the US.
The US is looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, where people weren't allowed to leave. Even China doesn't have this problem; there are tons of Chinese expats living in democratic nations, and they don't have problems like this.
Really? Wise has been reliable for a long time and they've improved the partners they work with in the last year to get much faster transfer times. I've sent around 15-20k usd with wise
Wise was reliable and cheap up until October when they cancelled all the business debit cards and changed all business account/ routing numbers, both with a 2 day heads up. There’s no way to pay any of the bills that require debit/credit cards, so I just had to get a brick and mortar account. Wise said they’re “working hard” on getting to issuing new debit cards, but can’t give any sort of timeline.
I’ve moved the majority of my money out since it feels like they might fold soon, there’s just a lot of things on autopay with that account so it’s kind of a hassle to move everything off.
Sending money through them still seems to be OK, mostly. But holding funds -and similarly to the Chase stories in this post- seems to be risky business, if you don't fit a cookie cutter model of a business (for whatever Wise's definition of that is). Ironically if you're using Wise, you probably aren't a cookie cutter business in the first place, so I don't know what's going on with them.
Anecdotally it definitely also seems to be related if you deal with the third world much, as the linked OP below and myself are. Luckily the worst I've come across is arbitrary extra KYC popping up exactly as I'm needing to do time-sensitive transfers.
I exclusively use Wise for dealing with the third world. I never keep a balance there, just instant transfers, as I don’t trust any pseudo banks like paypal to not freeze accounts for no reason.
Protip to anybody dealing with a bureaucracy, no matter whether it's automated or human-based, public or private, fair or oppressive: don't look weird. Bureaucracies function by finding the right category and using the appropriate process for the category. If they can't place you in the right category, you may be in trouble. To avoid that, you can try using products and services that signal the right category, even when they are more expensive and less convenient than the alternatives.
Of course, that doesn't help if you don't just look weird but actually are weird. Spending a lot of time overseas is not weird in itself, because it's common enough. Some specific international situations are weird. Because such situations are rare, it's not cost-effective for the bureaucracy to develop processes for dealing with them fairly.
It's in the PNW and rhymes with Win Far. Started as a teacher's union before opening up to the general public. I did some brief research into their background when I chose them, since I was looking for a no-frills checking account that wouldn't let me overdraft. Essentially just simple, "safe", normal banking or whatever, without fees.
The only catch seems to be that I had to buy a share in the company that I assume they make interest on later. Seems fair enough, and I haven't heard of anyone's account being closed randomly, at least not yet.
The bullshit you had to go through is the reason why a lot of people believe in bitcoin even if communities like NN love to pretend there is no use case for crypto.
I have been residing overseas for the last 6 years, living in and visiting 27 countries in total. I also have 5 bank accounts and 9 cards, all registered to a virtual mail address and a VoiP phone number. No problems so far.
Expanding on your point, when people say 'overseas' they should be more specific. To take an extreme example, spending a bunch of time in France is different than say Somalia.
>Yay, patriot act. Glad we have so much energy focusing on legit bankers instead of the crypto that is actually funding multiple US adversaries at this very moment
I have never in my life seen someone identity a problem and then blame the solution this quickly.
I had an account in Wise, and I was transferring money between my accounts (all the names were same). Everything was legal but they closed my account and started replying to my emails with huge delays. I provided all the supportive documents for the transactions but they said they will keep the account closed (and according to the user agreement, it seems they can do it without providing the reason). They held significant amount of my money in the account, and it took a long time to withdraw it.
Also, if you get flagged in one of these services, they usually send your info to similar companies and they either close your account or don't let you create new accounts.
Federal Credit Union, they have the Federal Deposit Insurance. Whatever that means. I do know that when the California Franchise Tax Board erroneously claimed i owed them a few hundred dollars that J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan locked me out of my account within minutes - and charged me ~$150 for the pleasure - but neither my credit union nor my Mellon bank accounts were affected at all.
Federal Credit Unions or just credit unions. They're smaller, community banks with a different organizational structure. They're something akin to a co-op, so member-owned.
900 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 419 ms ] threadI will try again from another system to see if it still works.
Thanks.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 "Tell HN: Archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)"
So do vote it up.
It's already highly anti-democratic, but imagine what an aggressive, oppressive government will do with this power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-g...
It’s particularly bad in some cities. Rather than enforcing access to the special hell that is US retail banking, just prohibit businesses from ripping out their existing cash infrastructure.
Even with a bank account, your ability to transact is subject to surveillance and seizure/freezing without evidence or probable cause. Cash has none of these problems.
Good idea to decline those
This has been going on for a very, very long time: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/drug-search-trekies-s...
Driving with any amount of cash above a few hundred will get you robbed by the police in asset forfeiture. It happens everyday around the country to small business owners that deal with a lot of cash.
It's reasonable to demand that your employer make your whole pay (less withholdings) available to you, and if you are unable to maintain a bank account, and their bank charges a fee to honor checks, that's not really reasonable if you are paid by check.
[1] https://www.mybanktracker.com/news/check-cashing-fees-top-ba...
New Zealand doesn't have cheques any more. Banks here totally phased them out a couple of years back.
The USA will also make checks obsolete over time.
Plus cash is disliked at many retailers and cash is not acceptable at some locations (e.g. my skifield only accepts cards - I was told it is because the nearest small-town bank won't accept cash deposits from the skifield). I suspect our government will slowly discourage cash 1. to prevent tax evasion (cash jobs), and 2. to prevent illegal purchases (e.g. weed). Those are the main uses for cash that I personally see others use cash for (I use cash because I like using it and I like privacy).
New Zealand is a small country way out in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean 2.5K miles (or over 4K kilometers) away from its nearest neighbor and with a population smaller than NYC. The United States is 50 stubborn ass States plus the Fed’s occupation in southern Maryland. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has an address in Wellington, is owned by the New Zealand government and answerable to Parliament. The Federal Reserve system isn’t even a single bank with a single board of directors, isn’t wholly owned by the US Government and isn’t directly answerable to Congress.
There’s no easy way to make a lazy comparison between us and have it be convincing. Parts of the Federal Government would likely love to see the United States become a cashless society but they don’t always get what they want.
Australia has a population bigger than NYC and "Australia is set to be a cheque-less society by the end of the decade, if the federal government has its way."
Zealand has a population and land area similar to Oregon. Might as well say NZ has a much bigger population than Wyoming - NYC is irrelevant.
Cheques have slowly disappeared because of economic reasons: the transaction costs/risks involved, and because electronic transfers have benefits. The economic forces are likely similar in the states. I believe the change has little to do with the NZ government nor the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
What the United States lacks is the kind of central control that a Westminster-style of government can exercise, even over cash money and checks, and there are a lot more institutions with some say over the continued prevalence of cash so even as its usage declines it is unlikely to completely disappear even in our lifetimes. Even if Chase stops giving their customers checkbooks, it doesn’t mean M&T will, and even if M&T does, it doesn’t mean there won’t be a bank that makes it a point to offer free checkbooks as a value add to small business owners that want to continue issuing paper checks to their employees. The form money takes here tends to be additive, and it is rare for a system to ever completely disappear. I mean next on the chopping block is probably Zelle followed by ACH of all things now that we have FedNow, and even that’s not necessarily going to happen.
AFAIK it was economic and convenience forces that caused the disappearance of cheques over a couple of decades. Banks discouraged chequebooks by making the accounts and books expensive. Retailers at most risk of receiving bad cheques started not accepting cheques (e.g. gas stations). Handling fees for cheques. Chequebooks not available to people with credit risk. Businesses stopped paying using cheques - instead they needed a bank account. New Zealanders got more familiar with cards and direct debits, so fewer New Zealanders (individuals and businesses) used cheques.
AFAIK it wasn't a top-down activity in New Zealand. Australia's move seems to be more government based but I would guess Oz is part way down the tracks of discouraging cheques.
The last time I remember handling a cheque in NZ was back in the 2000's (dividend payment). I remember thinking cheques were quaint when I worked in the US in the 90's: we have been slowly discouraging them in NZ for decades.
It is just like how we are not paid in cash at the end of the week no more - systemic change happens slowly.
Especially since they would likely assume that the person earned this punishment and thus is a risk to employ.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/employers-gold-silver-pay...
Canada has laws[1] intended to ensure access to banking, with $10M fines for violations. Not familiar with them myself and wondering how effective they are, and whether anyone has sued and won. It's maybe a bit ironic considering how the government here improperly locked a lot of people out of their funds during the trucker protests (the inquiry found collateral damage where people completely uninvolved were affected).
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
Pretty sure it's a global agreement around terrorist funding.
The solution to the problem is not to force retail banks to extend their terrible customer service to all of society, it’s to ensure the utility of cash. Cash works great even if the banks (or the state) hate you.
I believe it's optional for you, but not for the great majority of people. Lack of access to banking services specifically holds back a lot of people (look up 'unbanked').
Where are you supposed to hold your cash, under a mattress?
Banking is definitely not optional. Certain transactions, specially those done online, require digital payments that cannot be done with physical cash. It's increasingly a required part that's needed if you want to participate in modern society, and the lack of access to such banking systems forces people to adopt subpar services as a replacement.
In the ideal case, banking should be a utility like power & water: A necessity for modern life, without which certain daily routines would not be possible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/the-gla...
With some luck ten years from now there may be a bill in the US trying to fix some of the worst aspect of KYC/AML (like regular people getting their bank accounts closed for no reason and without any explanation).
Never answer with any info, never consent to searches.
Innocent until proven guilty, not guilt until proven innocent.
Being de-platformed from financial infrastructure is tantamount to being economically jailed and instantly forced into life altering poverty. This isn’t some silly app you’re getting banned from…
Banks shouldn’t be allowed to ban anyone. They should need a court order to lock up/ban someone from access/mobility of their own property.
That said, this is likely a narrow lens statement. The problem is more complex around governments/judicial systems incentivizing banks to behave like governments. In reality, our regulatory agencies need to do their jobs: regulate/enforce and be held accountable when they don’t (instead of passing that enforcement on to banks through threat of liability).
Banks are creatures of government, they're never going to be private competitive businesses. The solution is to recognise this and subject them to the same oversight that government is: FOIA, the equal protection clause, all of that good stuff.
Seriously? Nope. Nope. Nope. No.
Remember 2008.
This gets pretty tricky - telling a bank they need to keep dealing with customers that cost them tons of money and are actively trying to defraud them (and other customers) seems awfully harsh.
I think the government should provide a basic bank account to anyone who wants one though.
It would probably be more reasonable to make some sort of tightly regulated basic bank account that banks would be required to offer in some situations.
Nobody would be happy, but hold all deposits for a long period, so that they fully clear. Possibly restrict the sources of funds; maybe a basic bank account can only accept payroll and government deposits, maybe a limit of N unique payers per unit time. Etc. Social security and state benefit programs have specialized accounts for people without other bank accounts, because it works better than sending checks in the mail, maybe one of those programs could be slightly more generalized.
Allow a bank to refuse to service an otherwise qualifying basic banking customer only if the bank goes through a court process and/or is accompanied by actual criminal charges filed.
Yeah, I'd be ok with this. Require banks to provide some MVP 'bank account' to anyone that isn't already declared banking-persona-non-grata by the courts.
So, the legal system? The only reason regulated banks should be able to deplatform someone is if they also have a legally actionable case, and they do legally action it, and the person is found guilty.
If being banked is so critical (and it is, in modern society) then it shouldn't be handled solely by private enterprise. Government needs to step in and offer basic services.
Strawman all you want, but there's a big difference between social media and finance.
Banks have special rules because they are infrastructure. A cafe needs a bank but not vice versa.
Private companies should be allowed to print private notes. (Of course, with distinctive designs etc. We don't want anyone fooled into mixing them up.)
I would expect private issuers in eg the US to denominate their notes in USD. Or if USD were to abolished tomorrow, they would probably denominate in Euro. Failing that, I would expect a return to denomination in gold before denomination in car fleets.
Backing is a different issue. Walmart could denominate their notes in gold, but back them with the strength of their overall balance sheet and operations. Just like banks today denominate the contents of your bank account in USD, but back them with their balance sheets. (And have only a small fraction of their assets in USD reserves at the Fed or vault cash.)
> Problem is people getting ripped off or rugpulled.
That wasn't much of a problem historically.
Stocks are (in practice, effectively) denominated as fractions of company.
What I am describing is closer to bonds. They are denominated in currency, but still backed by the value of the company.
Bonds (or something equivalent to bonds) are used all the time to pay people. Eg someone who gets paid at the end of the month accrues something like a bond throughout the month. The company owes her more and more of something denominated in currency, not in stocks. At the end of the month, the company redeems that IOU by transferring currency.
Paying people in stocks is much rarer.
Importantly, the base pay of most people from one month to the next is fixed in terms of currency, not in terms of a specific number of stocks.
I don't think "you can't fire a customer" is a good one though.
There's also a distinction between not being able to use a particular bank and not being able to use any bank. It's important that everyone be able to use some bank, but not that everyone can use Chase, but it's tough to regulate that. Again, this is why I see a government option as necessary.
Locking up the money is basically theft, but I'm sure the law and regulations say otherwise.
Say, I have 3 millions somehow deposited in the $bank_where_i_put_my_shady_money, I want to take/move the money, but doing so will raise some eyebrows, so I deliberately try to debank myself so that I can get all my money cash OR move it to $partner_bank
Absolutely agree. Holding and transferring money should be a basic human right.
Example: In the EU all internet transactions require a second factor, it's annoying -- but typing in a credit card number is already crappy UX.
But making identify theft harder could also reduce risk of keeping clients with abnormal patterns. Since the bank will have more confidence that the customer isn't subject to identity theft.
Obviously, there are more options. Maybe, banks should be held more accountable.
But increasing the bar for fraud by having a strong online identity system could probably raise the bar a lot.
That presumes (and requires) a very specific risk model by the banks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco...
https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/
https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...
https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...
"A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features:
1 People invest into it because they expect good profits, and
2. that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,
3. there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,
4. the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while
5. the operators take away a large portion of this money."
This is great because points 3 and 5 are trivially proved false for Bitcoin and shows that is no more a ponzi scheme than stocks or real estate or any other common investment.
Thank you for the insight.
"By that definition the USD is a ponzi. No, national currencies too fail to fit the definition, because people do not 'invest' in them with the expectation of gain..."
And gas fees means a large portion of money goes towards the "operators" (miners) of the network.
Bitcoin miners do collect rewards and fees (but not "gas" because that's an ethereum thing not a Bitcoin thing) and Miners are a key part of the operation of Bitcoin, but they are not "the operators" of Bitcoin in the same sense that Bernie Madoff was the operator of his fund. Anyone who wants to can become a miner, no permission necessary. Miners do not actively direct the activity of Bitcoin, they cannot change the rules (especially about how much revenue they collect), allow or disallow certain people from participating (and stay profitable), or anything like that.
There are other cryptocurrencies (most of them actually) where the developers of the currency act a lot more like Bernie Madoff type operators. They own a vast majority of the tokens and the source code that runs the network and they make executive decisions about operations, supply of tokens, protocol (code) changes, etc. That is why those of us who have been around a while point out that Bitcoin is the only one that is not a scam.
#3 is trivially proven true. If there were no transaction fees and you rolled back all Bitcoin transactions ever made , you would end up with a zero. This is in stark contrast to a stock where you'd end up with the dividends.
#5 is perhaps better put as "operators take away some portion of this money" and that's what transaction fees are. Calling it large indeed weakens the argument -- but doesn't prove it false.
So really, it probably is imminent; what with fighting 2 (and maybe up to 5 or 6) proxy wars and letting corporations continue to erode the tax law and environment to the detriment of the average taxpayer.
I was told the US was the greatest country in the history of countries and i should be proud i was accidentally born here...
If you think you were lied to, you obviously have not lived in other countries. As shitty as America is, most of the the world is far worse ...
https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-paul-krugmans-problem...
He also said: " the Internet's Effect on the World Economy Would Be 'No Greater Than the Fax Machines"
I consider Krugeman a clear contra indicator. Bitcon long... :-)
> https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...
(The following comment is a copy of what I've already said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 )
Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue.
Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to.
> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves.
> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.
Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else.
Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/
The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by anyone from anyone willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute.
The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now.
EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will...
https://bsalert.com/fallacies/tu_quoque.html
> Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value
That's absolutely hilarious to read right below the paragraph which describes their inherent value.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/19/nigel-farag...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/natwest-meets-quart...
> If the bank has filed a SAR, it isn’t legally allowed to tell you, and the federal government prosecutes only a small fraction of the people whom the banks document in their SARs.
Sounds worryingly similar to an effective violation of habeas corpus ?
P.S.: To make the matters worse, it looks that trying to rely more on cash as an insurance against getting debanked, raises your risk of getting debanked !
the problem is that banks can't handle this requirement well. if they think something is suspicious, sure file the SAR/CTR, and then if they think there's a need for KYC, tell the customer that. the customer provides information about the transaction, the bank then can chill the fuck out. if this keeps going on they can eventually tell the customer that okay, it's too much work for them, please close the account in 1 month.
but no, they immediately switch into this crusader mode, because it's just easier for them, and customers have no recourse.
You are incredibly incorrect on that assertion. There is, in fact, a centralization/dictatorial dynamic at play, and it's called the Bank Secrecy Act.
Now it doesn't read like it, which most acts of american legislature don't, but on further observation of what it actually does, the intent becomes clear. There is one financial system in the U.S., you will play by it's rules or be excluded, it won't tell you why, it will not be a dumb pipe either. It is directly coupled to law enforcement, and the Federal Government, and yes, there is a Master list that if you get on it, will lock you out of withdrawing from (but not depositing into!) every U.S. bank.
Part of why I no longer do finance work. Once you see how the sausage is made, there is no shower hot enough to slough off the slimey feeling.
Whatever happens to you is fine and dandy as long as it doesn't happen to them... and it probably won't happen to them.
Until it does ... at which point they'll scream "Bloody Murder!" and ask "How could this happen to me?"
Reminds me of that D.A. that walked into a bank during the covid masking era and ruminated that they'd locked up people for less. I'm unsure if they changed their tactics or whatever because of this.
Most people grant these powers to the government hoping to get their pet peeve taken care of, and are surprised when the government not only doesn't do what they promised, but turn those powers onto its own favorite victims instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism
Unless you're implying Monero I don't think so.
> is uncensorable like cash
Uncensorable until you get sanctioned like Tornado Cash? Or this is also about Monero?
> but could also be digitally transmitted like electronic payments?
At the same speed, convenience, security and efficiency level?
I wish we could have something like Monero run by the Government backed by gold.
It is cash like in that if you typo the destination address you instantly lose all the money, which is sort of like how you can accidentally set cash on fire.
Who types destination addresses by hand? Probably the same people that expose a hoard of paper money to flames?
If you've ever said anything like "Donations accepted at $ADDRESS", then everyone can see if anyone ever sent anything, and from there it doesn't take much work to see if you ever spent that money on anything and what else you do with it.
You can obscure things some, but the records are permanent and anything people can figure out stays known. If the authorities are after you, then they can get information from exchanges, which at this point require giving them personal information.
Cash is much more private. It takes much more effort to figure out who you gave your cash to.
Variations of that show up everywhere: your employer can review your political donations or decide you spend too much money at the local bar, casino, or anywhere else they don’t approve of.
Major criminals get caught making mistakes on that kind of thing, there’s no way normal people aren’t going to make mistakes – and that’s before you think about what using a mixer actually means: lighting a neon sign saying “something about this transaction is dodgy, examine it!”
It's true that it is not completely anonymous, but it is a huge improvement over the current system we are discussing here. Add that to the other benefits Bitcoin has and I still feel like it's a huge win.
Here's also a flip side benefit to the public ledger. Businesses can, if they choose, cryptographically prove that they have the funds they say they have. Think of the value of that
First, following a chain is not as hard as you’re making out and there are existing companies which provide that service, which they’d pay just like they do credit reporting agencies - made easier by the fact that they’d be providing most of your income so it’d be starting with a known point. Mixers can be defeated but simply using one is a red flag.
Second, ordinary people are not going to perfectly follow a complicated setup – it’s not just that they make mistakes, although that’s a certainty, but also that they already aren’t interested in Bitcoin’s higher costs and slower transaction speeds so making those characteristics worse will not increase adoption. “Harder to use, costs more, still less secure than cash!” is not a compelling ad.
> Businesses can, if they choose, cryptographically prove that they have the funds they say they have. Think of the value of that
You mean they can make the same statements which businesses have been making since ancient times? The problem with all of these systems, as FTX customers can attest, is that the hard part isn’t counting what’s in your ledger but dealing with the real world outside – even if you can see all of my Bitcoin, you can’t know whether I have unrevealed debts or am about to be sued, etc. Since businesses run on credit, that means you still need auditors and courts to deal with the parts of the problem which aren’t simplistic enough for a blockchain.
Using the new tech like Schnorr signatures is not "a complicated setup" that "has to be maintained perfectly." It is (or will be soon) built-in to the wallet software. You won't have to think about it. Maybe you read a lot about early Bitcoin wallets that didn't even provide unique addresses for each transaction (was that ever even a thing?) but times have changed. The ecosystem just gets better and better.
Also, did you read the article I linked to? In another thread I provided some more explanation and links:
All the chain analysis you have heard of is based on likely patterns and typical behavior of address use in common Bitcoin wallet software. New signature and script schemes have been added to Bitcoin in the past several years that disrupt those patterns and make it even harder to find connections between addresses.
Further reading:
https://river.com/learn/bitcoin-privacy-and-anonymity/
https://river.com/learn/what-is-taproot/
On the business transparency, you seem to completely ignore the cryptographic proof businesses can provide, that's not the same statement that businesses have been making since ancient times. It's a mathematical guarantee. All the rest you point out is true though, and so you are right that it's not a total elimination of potential fraud.
It’s a mathematical guarantee in the same way that a bank statement is. It’s extremely rare for the problem to be counting things rather than undisclosed debts, embezzlement, etc. and that kind of thing is just as much of a problem for a Bitcoin user because the real world isn’t on the blockchain. If I look at your balance now, that doesn’t mean that you didn’t borrow 90% of that balance from someone else, neglect to mention that you have paid taxes, transfer it the instant after I signed a contract with you, etc. In all of those cases, we end up in a courtroom where a napkin with the CEO’s signature saying “IOU $1,0000,000” and a witness has the same legal weight as the Bitcoin network.
“Harder to use, costs more, still less secure than cash!”
None of those are absolutely true. For a local transaction in small amounts, yes, cash is easier and cheaper. For large transactions or for transactions with someone who is geographically far away, cash loses on all three of those, big time. I don't even need to explain why do I?
- There are a whole lot of bills to keep track of
- The serial numbers are not easily stored and compared with computers (at least not for private individuals)
That second point, bills not being on computers, is why cash isn't the easy answer to the banking problems we are discussing here. You can't pay someone across the country very easily using dollar bills.
With Bitcoin, there actually aren't any bills or tokens with serial numbers attached to them. There are however, as you point out, unique addresses for each transaction. Like the vast number of paper bill serial numbers, there are a lot of possibly Bitcoin addresses. Far, far more than there are paper dollar bills, sands in the sea, and stars in the sky, actually.
It is, however, somewhat possible to track Bitcoin going too and from the addresses because it is all on computers and this is a trade off of Bitcoin being permission-less and not controlled by a single entity that can decide to unbank you, and online so that you can send it to people across the country.
So, as you point out, if someone publicly associates themselves with a Bitcoin address, and if they reuse that address over and over, you can see how much Bitcoin is going into and out of that address, and if the other addresses in these transactions are also known, then you can easily see that Bob sent Alice some Bitcoin. Address reuse and publicly associating yourself with an address was unfortunately common in the early days of Bitcoin, but practically it never never happens anymore. Instead each and every transaction uses a new unique address, and as I said before, there a vast huge number of possible addresses.
As for exchanges, yes, they do have identities associated with Bitcoin addresses. You can easily accept bitcoin from an exchange and then transfer it again to other addresses that have not been publicly associated with you. Also, hopefully someday exchanges won't be necessary.
It's not "somewhat" possible, it's 100% possible because the history is public and permanent. If you make a mistake once in your entire life Chainalysis will see through anything you previously did to obscure a transaction.
All the chain analysis you have heard of is based on likely patterns and typical behavior of address use in common Bitcoin wallet software. New signature and script schemes have been added to Bitcoin in the past several years that disrupt those patterns and make it even harder to find connections between addresses.
Further reading:
https://river.com/learn/bitcoin-privacy-and-anonymity/
https://river.com/learn/what-is-taproot/
If you're claiming these upgrades made Bitcoin anonymous in 2021, that's obviously not true, since multiple people who stole billions of dollars of bitcoins from exchanges have been caught with chain analysis since then.
https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/crime/2022/11/08/for...
He definitely wasn't using Schnorr signatures 10 years ago.
Bitcoin is not magical and perfect, trade-offs have to be made in any endeavor. I personally think the ones Bitcoin has made are good ones. Maybe you still disagree.
Of course, all later ones are funnier. People think Ethereum is a distributed computer! But the whole network runs at the speed of a single node.
If you want to trade numbers with people over the internet, I recommend using Google Sheets. Maybe ban people if they edit it wrong.
Cryptocurrency folks do sometimes take the open source Bitcoin code and make small (or large) changes to it in order to do their work. When they do this they create a separate codebase, separate network, and a separate currency. Almost inevitably they do so in such a way as to greatly benefit themselves and to fool you.
I don't see any significant difference between Bitcoin and the rest. Bitcoin was just the first thing that stuck but that doesn't grant it any special privileges.
Yeah, inertia, social pressure, and economic incentives. For instance miners are into it for the money, so to them technology doesn't matter. A technologically superior network is of no use to a miner if mining for it makes less money.
> Or just respectfully stay out of these conversations maybe?
Nope.
Which is stupid, because Bitcoin is THE number 1 crypto, but for some reason they're all claiming it isn't.
In all seriousness, it's not just a talking point. Bitcoin's invention, promises, implementation, and operation has significant fundamental differences from all the others. If all you can be bothered to do is say, "yep, they all look the same to me," then maybe just sit out this conversation?
I didn't dispute any transactions, nor did I deposit any fraudulent checks, no check bounces, no overdrafts, no cash deposits, no wires, not an instance of disrespecting any Chase employee either on phone or in person. Yes, I used Zelle often, I deposited checks often. When people complain about debanking, many folks defend these banks, saying that there are good reasons for these banks to close (some transaction, etc).
Banks are heavily regulated, I understand. Regulators want to see a certain number of SAR and CTR filings based on the size of bank. If a bank has 1M accounts, regulators want to see a certain number of SAR/CTR filings, a certain number of account closures; regulators go hard on financial institutions, if the latter don't follow the industry average (#SARs, #CTRs, #closures). This has created a vicious loop: banks use machine-learning/AI to flag accounts; then, back office employees 95% of the time just close these accounts.
Welcome to the new debanking world. Chase and many others also monitor your political activity, social media, protests, etc. If they don't like you, they can close your account by simply stating that "we have an obligation to know our customers; after careful consideration, we decided to close your account". When banks decide to close your checking accounts, beware that they also close your credit cards (esp Chase is notorious for this).
BTC for investment or long-term store of value. BCH, or various other alternatives (Litecoin, XRP, Stellar, cough Nano cough), for making payments. But if you can use the Lightning network, then BTC works for payments as well (arguably - in this space anything and everything is highly arguable).
If you're seriously looking down the track at using cryptocurrency, spend some time playing with small amounts of it to see how it all works. Different coins have different use-cases, and it's very confusing to come from zero knowledge. Also transferring and converting between different coin types can kill you in fees, so keep an eye on that as well.
And in doing your research don't believe what anyone says about anything, especially youtube folks. Find the most likely narratives amongst the jungle of snakes and traps, based on your own experience at detecting bullshit and applying logic.
Bitcoin itself has the longest, most proven history. It's the safest house in the least safe neighbourhood. It's also the best performing asset of it's lifetime so far (something like that anyway).
It's use-case has changed since it was created, and there are additional use-cases to which other cryptocurrencies cater, smart contracts being the primary example (which then facilitate a whole other ecosystem of products, of arguable value and utility to humanity).
I'm around 50% bitcoin-maxi, to expose my illogical stance :)
I also have barely a little toe dipped into that particular asset pool, so my opinion isn't necessarily fully formed or well founded.
If you know of better ones please chime in
Could you clarify what you find interesting about it? I skimmed their website and looks like just a lightning wallet. Am I missing some key feature that helps one interact with fiat systems?
Acting as an alternative to krupan's Bitcoin-centric answer:
- There are other crypto rails other than Bitcoin that could be used in its place. USDC & stablecoins in general is going to be the medium-term winners in this space, as more services are set up to help people pay their bills with stablecoins. Here are 2 services that I've found within a few minutes of searching "USDC pay bill":
https://www.spritz.finance/blog/pay-bills-crypto
https://bitpay.com/bill-pay/
- As for transaction costs, L2s are already being deployed, and their fees will only be further reduced as improvements to the L2 networks are made.
https://l2fees.info/
I'm no crypto fanatic, but I call plenty of things a "space". It's basically a synonym for niche?
> rule of thumb
Not to be confused with a universal law.
See also that the other comments pointed out that the USDC recommendation didn't even make a whole lot of sense. Hmm...
You might as well just say that mentioning crypto at all is a red flag and call it a day.
> Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain.
I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.
> I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.
Term by term:
- EVM-equivalent: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the part that allows smart contract code can be run on the network. EVM-equivalency means that you can just drop in your smart contract code, and it has to run as it would on Ethereum itself.
- Optimistic Rollup: A Rollup is the current consensus for scaling up the network, by outsourcing compute to other networks, and pushing the important end state back into Ethereum. Optimistic rollups do this by assuming that there'll be at least 1 person to challenge a proposed block whenever that block's invalid. This setup however has the shortcoming of needing there to be a challenge window for other participants in the network to have time to respond.
It's the unfortunate consequence of one gigantic unaddressable problem:
USD can only be minted efficiently by the Fed.
- Collateralized stablecoins exist, but they're inefficient in that they must be overcollateralized to cushion against falling asset values.
- USDC & their kind are efficient, but at the cost of being centralization vectors as a result of current US legislation
- An efficient synthetic stablecoin can exist, but it requires deep liquidity in the marketplace to keep the peg stable. (Probably > $100B at the ready to absorb panic sells) Synthetic stocks are the closest analogy available for this, but applied upon a currency. The chicken-and-egg means that bootstrapping something like this is not feasible at small scales: It needs to be big from the get go.
Law: 18 U.S. Code § 1960
Meanwhile I've had the majority of my net worth on Ethereum for over 5 years now and am not really worried about it. And I get user experience that I can never get with bitcoin, like social recovery smart contract wallets.
And taproot is two years old.
Distributed permissionless databases of any sort are a bust and a scam, period. This was tested and found true in the 70s.
If you think about it you are very limited in what you can do. You have an asset that you can self-custody, exchange permissionlessly and without censorship which is good to fight what the original article is about. But you cannot build any financial product on top of it that would have those same properties. Nor be able to scale the transactions per second that the base layer does while keeping those same properties. And I find it very unlikely you can serve the entire world with 7 transactions per second. So yes, there is plenty to innovate on its core function.
Correct, and yet you seem to still miss the point. There are tradeoffs. You can't scale AND maintain those properties. This is why Bitcoin scales with layer 2 solutions like Lightning (and more ideas like Enigma, Ark, Cashu etc.), or things like RGB or Taro for expressiveness. Separation of concerns.
The best attempts to have their cake and eat it too have failed in crypto.
There is very little innovation to be had in the core function of what a blockchain was designed to achieve. There's plenty of innovation ahead of us for the layers that are built on top of it.
zk-proofs allow you to do so. It's seeing very active development, and yes it involves an L2. The issue you seemed to have ignored is that to be able for the L2s to inherit those properties from the L1, the L1 needs to have sufficient expressiveness to be able to build the proof verifiers. I would love to see how anyone builds such a thing on bitcoin.
* Transaction throughput.
* Efficiency - allowing small scale players to participate in verification and block production.
* Inter-chain communication - some networks are explicitly designed as connected swarms of chains (Cosmos and polkadot for example) and some evolving into that direction outside of the protocol level (Ethereum). How do execute transactions that span the networks is an ongoing research topic.
* Privacy - how to execute transactions in private. How to attest that something is true, say that you have a certain credential, without exposing your account information. Blockchain has been why zero knowledge (and now homo-morphic encryption it seems) cryptography are becoming an active field of research.
* Identity, authentication, account recovery. - these tie into cryptography but generally research on applied cryptography with good UX. For example the first time I've seen social-recovery accounts with any amount of usage (now a feature in Apple accounts) was in a blockchain application.
* Monetary research - far from everybody involved in crypto believes that a fixed-supply rare item makes for good money. "Fiat" money is basically a "token" with governance attached to it. This has lead to a wave of experimentation with other forms of tokens - ones that are algorithmically tied to other assets, ones that are backed by an organization, local currencies, etc.
* Organizational research - since smart contracts can effectively be transparent community banks there's has been a plethora of experiments with building organizations that manage their own treasuries. Horizontalism, organizational transparency and cooperation is something that's been at the core of many crypto projects, the idea being that something cannot be both a reliable public good and controlled by a single party. It's not an easy task, but some cool organizations have come out of this. For an example look at pocket: https://messari.io/report/governor-note-proof-of-participati...
Spoiler: Bitcoin wins on all of those. The market cap is better for a reason.
Bitcoin has also done this.
You're referring to the $50m DAO smart contract bug (or "hack") early in 2016, when Ethereum had been running for about a year. The Ethereum blockchain was swiftly rolled back. This was achieved by the majority of Ethereum developers agreeing to create an update to Ethereum software that reversed the hackers transactions specifically, and the great majority of users and miners agreeing to use that updated software. The people behind the DAO were closely connected to the Ethereum developers. Some of them were Ethereum developers. Some of the people who lost money in the DAO were Ethereum developers.
What you're unaware of apparently, is that when Bitcoin had been running for about a year, in 2010, a bug allowed someone to create 184 billion Bitcoins. This effectively made everybody's Bitcoins worthless (or even more worthless!). This event was ALSO swiftly rolled back, just like the Ethereum DAO event, by the same consensus process that I described above.
"Core developers Gavin Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto were on the case, and the 184 billion BTC transaction was purged from block 74638."
https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-history-part-10-the-184-bil...
Since then, there have been various incidents involving Ethereum and Bitcoin and hacks or smart contract bugs that caused losses of millions or billions. But neither currency has ever done a roll back of this nature again.
For instance. A year or so after Ethereum's DAO debacle, there was another similar event, the Parity bug, which accidentally locked $230m in a smart contract, permanently. The people operating Parity were closely connected to the Ethereum developers, some of them were Ethereum developers. But this time, although the victims pleaded for a roll back, it was never seriously considered.
https://news.bitcoin.com/parity-calls-for-ethereum-hard-fork...
Maybe not a rollback, but Ethereum has proven it is malleable time and time again. As one example, compare the issuance of ether to Bitcoin. Eth's issuance is a dog's breakfast, indicative of changing opinions by those who call the shots... just like a central bank.
Bitcoin's issuance? Predictable and steady as a rock for 15 years.
Another example is replacing Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Stake. A core part of how it works, important for censorship resistance and accessibility, and they removed it for something permissioned that makes censorship far easier.
Bitcoin? Still on PoW and never going to change. If you think it will change, you still don't understand Bitcoin. But never fear, there's already a PoS Bitcoin out there (that no one uses).
I quoted the single issue that I was disputing. I wrote as clearly as possible to only refute one point, about the implication that Bitcoin had never done a roll back.
If you want to talk about all those other things, then make a separate thread or post,. Please don't use my comment as a vehicle for your arguments, because it's confusing and few people will understand what you're talking about.
The ethereum fork was to fix a bug in a smart contract running on top of ethereum. That bug only affected those who were participating in that smart contract (which was code for an investment scheme that a private organization had dreamed up). Lots of ethereum users complained about it.
Can you see the difference?
Yes, I do see some differences. It's true that the situations were not identical. Thanks for your interesting reply.
One important difference is that the amount of money lost in the DAO was MUCH larger than the amount lost by the Bitcoin bug (the Bitcoin bug simply lost the total value of all valid Bitcoins, which I guess was only about $1m at that time in 2010, with few individuals holding substantial amounts). This meant that not much money was at stake and fewer people were affected, so the roll back was less contentious.
:
But there's a VERY important similarity between the two events: They were both existential threats to the respective currency.
That existential threat to Bitcoin was obvious. As you have just said, Bitcoin would have died if they did not quickly invalidate the 'faked' Bitcoins, because the quantity completely dwarfed the true Bitcoin money supply. So it was clearly the right thing to do.
The existential threat of the DAO bug to Ethereum was less clear. There was also more time to decide what to do, because the stolen funds had not yet been released from the smart contract, (and I recall the money could be stalled in the contract almost indefinitely by white hat hackers iteratively exploiting the same bug that had created the problem.)
But the consensus at the time, very early in Ethereum's life, was that Ethereum might die if 15% of the entire currency was in a state of limbo, or in the hands of a malicious hacker. This was compounded by the reputational damage and loss of confidence caused by such a huge disaster that directly impacted thousands of the most active Ethereum users, not just a few Ethereum developers.
:
I pointed out that some Ethereum developers lost substantial amounts in the DAO, so I can accept that personal financial loss probably also biased the decisions of some of them to approve a roll back.
But I personally don't believe that personal loss suffered by some Ethereum developers was a very significant factor in the decision to do a roll back of the DAO event. To explain my reasoning: That is why I mentioned the Parity bug.
The Parity bug was an even larger loss in financial terms, but it only affected a very small number of people, who mostly were Ethereum developers. The lost money was destroyed, not stolen. It did not affect the wider community, so it was not seen as an existential threat to Ethereum. So there was no question of a roll back.
:
Possibly the quite acrimonious argument over the DAO fix, which was bad enough to cause a semi-viable hard fork (creating the ETC currency), was an additional factor discouraging the developers and community from accepting a roll back to fix the Parity bug and later incidents.
Edit: Like you've mentioned, another difference is that the Bitcoin issue was a bug in Bitcoin itself. The Ethereum issues were coding bugs in smart contracts. I'm just making an observation about that, not claiming that one currency is better than the other.
The bitcoin fork was to fix a broken promise. The bug meant that Bitcoin didn't work as promised, the code fix and fork fixed that.
One of Ethereum's promises around smart contracts was, "code is law." The fork broke that promise by circumventing the smart contract code.
It is good that they have never done that again, but they have been making other big changes to the original Ethereum code not to fix bugs and broken promises, but to change the way it works. That, to me, is a concern.
Sneaky of you to add "Bitcoin" to that sentence, implying that smart contract bugs on Bitcoin, or Bitcoin hacks have cost people millions or billions. That is completely false, but nice try.
The hacks I was talking about were just all the numerous attacks on exchanges and users that have involved BTC or ETH getting stolen.
It's sort of tedious discussing this kind of thing on HN because there will always be some guy who jumps in and says 'Well, ACTUALLY, what about SBF and FTX!!" even though I'm not talking about that. So, I just wanted to admit there had been many other financial losses, to try to avoid all those clever people replying and telling me about MtGox or Tether or something like that, as if I didn't already know about it. Kind of like that other guy who replied to my comment with something mostly irrelevant that he wanted to spout.
I didn't have time to write that all out in such pedantically specific detail - almost nobody is reading this. So, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding that I created. I was not being sneaky. You know: Sometimes, people just don't have time to explain everything in detail.
You seem like someone who is able to see this side of the argument, so thank you again for your comments.
I'm not so sure about understandability at protocol level, I do believe Ethereum to be straightforward but then again I've followed its progress over the years
In this case the disagreement happened because of a backwards incompatible change that was accidentally made to the mining software. Nodes running the old software rejected blocks generated by the new software. The bug was fixed and miners happily stopped using the buggy version of code and the chain fork was resolved, just as designed by the Bitcoin protocol. Nodes that never ran the buggy version didn't have to do a thing.
Like my discussion of the other bitcoin fork, this to me looks like an entirely different category of event than the DAO. Bitcoin fixed a broken promise in both cases. Ethereum broke a promise in the DAO fork.
(Hilariously the first google hit did not work, so I went to the second https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/training/annual... - look who's hosting that)
I use 3 separate banks for this reason. But honestly, the 'reason' for dropping me might be a 3rd party risk assessment that flags something and services all three banks... Or some sort of story or hysteria that could trigger three similar systems.
Using a decent crypto currency with good practice, the biggest threat is me messing something up. And i can put systems in place to minimize this. The only issue is that most things i spend moneys on don't accept crypto and so still need banking services to use crypto. I hope this changes.
Unverifiable, untraceable money arriving into your account does not work well with AML regualations.
Did Chase let you withdraw the outstanding balance in full when they closed your account? The last thing I want is to see my money being trapped in limbo state...
The case one should worry about these banks is this: you deposit a $500K check, or you got a wire for $500K; check was cleared on the sender's side. Now Chase/Big Bank holds your funds, saying that this check is fraudulent, and that bank closes your account after finding you risky (risky because of this $500k and by looking back at your account history). Now $500K is in Chase's hands, your account is closed by Chase, and Chase doesn't want to give $500K, nor does Chase want to return $500K to the original bank/sender. This is where you should file a complaint with CFPB right away. Without CFPB complaints, the fraud department at Chase, its Bank employees just give you run around for months. File CFPB complaint right away, if any bank holds your funds after 10 business days; don't listen to these employees at all.
CFPB can't force banks to reopen your accounts. Just to get your funds, file a complaint with CFPB right away, and don't trust any bank employee on getting your funds.
And of course if it's business transactions, do it with a business account.
What caused the closure? A legitimate transaction that they find suspicious. Conjunction of two issues--not sending the funds back and closing the account without releasing funds to the customer--is real 'thievery' in my opinion. Since big banks are NOT interested in resolving disputes about funds by lying to customers, better file a complaint with CFPB right away with many details and documents.
Also, business accounts aren't immune from this dynamic, as per the article. It seems like you're just grasping at bureaucratic straws here in search of the just world theory. But no, the whole thing is really an accountable terrible dynamic that will continue to get worse and worse until it affects enough people that the laws change.
I suspect the bar would not allow that.
The problem is what you are describing is not exactly legal. You are acting as a money transmitter for your mother; and this might even trigger for you some complex tax obligations.
What you should do is open a Chase bank account for your mother. You already bank with the agency.
Perhaps this article demonstrates that the largest banks are unable to know their customers and truly act on that information. And, perhaps having those banks engage in self-destructive mass cancelations serves regulators' purposes just fine.
Strong controls = more false positives, more account closures, more SAR reports. That's what regulators want, and politicians don't want to rein on these regulators either by amending laws or by reducing "too much discretion" given to regulators. Of course, those affected by debanking (ordinary citizens and small businesses) don't have that kind of lobbying power to bring any such changes.
Big businesses instead can own small banks in fly over states, and run their transactions through those banks. Maybe, it is time to bank with local credit unions, as the latter allow mobile deposits. Once FedNow takes hold across credit unions, better switch to credit unions.
Another lesson: every one should have at least three checking accounts (one or two big banks; one or two credit unions).
imagine if some bank knowingly facilitated money laubdering, and needed to show they gave strong controls. What eould you do?
Thats right, you would close 10k minor accounts of random schmucks for 'suspicious activity', report 'job done' to the regulator, and continue your corrupt practices
And the reason for that is that if anybody knew that somebody was engaged in criminal activity, they wouldn't have their bank account closed, they would be arrested and their finances seized by court order. So the bank account closures only happen to people for whom there is not enough evidence to charge them with a crime. In other words, a ton of innocent people.
Conversely, the bank is not a law enforcement agency and has no real way to distinguish between the kind of criminals who know how not to be obvious and the aforementioned totally innocent people, and if anything the practiced criminals are the ones who know how not to trigger the fraud detection algorithms, unlike the innocent people.
So the criminals don't get caught and the government blames the banks for this, but the banks still don't have any good way to know who the criminals actually are, so all they can ever do is round up random innocent people to put on a show of punishing somebody.
The fraud is that law enforcement should be an obligation of the banking system and that fraud needs to be eliminated.
You won't have to imagine very hard, HSBC was caught laundering money, told they had to strengthen their controls, but ultimately all the Justice Department wanted was a small cut of the action in the form of fines and HSBC has been allowed to continue their corrupt practices even after being caught laundering money again and again (in addition to all kinds of other crimes). It seems like as long as they can pay the fines, banks are basically above the law.
GP says "monitoring transactions should not be sufficient to satisfy KYC" - of course monitoring transactions is required to satisfy AML, flagging any transactions indicates specific knowledge of them being suspicious, and failing to act in any cases where it was warranted will be used as proof of lax controls, with fines starting in the hundreds of millions.
The second time it's flagged for reason X+1, include 10 lines from rank 2 manager.
The moment you start use Zelle heavily, one of those zelle recipients is linked with suspicious activity, that's a problem (btw, Zelle is owned by big banks). Banks find so many things suspicious: many check deposits, many zelle transfers, low balances, many cash/money order deposits, asking for cashier checks, wires(both domestic and foreign), any crypto activity, being a public figure, names similar to those on OFAC list, etc. Basically, they want normal customers (4 pay stubs, paying 10 bills a month) or extremely wealthy clients. Otherwise, you don't fit the average profile, and whatever you do is construed as not being legitimate.
Of course they do. If they didn't have a reason, why would they do it?
I've never used a credit union and have had access to mobile deposits at everything from large multinational banks to small local ones for well over a decade.
Not to defend banks, but you know how many bugs the average large software system has?
This is a big claim. It should have big evidence to back it up.
"19 Republican states accuse JPMorgan of closing bank accounts and discriminating against customers due to their religious or political beliefs" [1][3]. Of course, this site is not favorable to conservatives and their views. Some left activists' accounts are closed as well [2].
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/republican-states-accuse-jpm...
[2] https://nitter.cz/OccupyWallStNYC/status/1674022837084991489
[3] https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/chase-bank-cancels-nonprofits-b...
The same way that Chase closing a restaurant's account is not evidence that Chase is tasting the food in every restaurant and systematically closing accounts for restaurants that cook food that Chase doesn't like.
Based on that standard template, I won't trust big banks, because, hiding behind BSA, banks can use the blanket statement "because of unexpected activity". Now you ask me to trust Banks, because they can't show that evidence to me.
It's about the big claim that Chase monitors the political activity of their customers and systematically closes the accounts of people with opinions Chase doesn't like.
There's precisely zero evidence that they do this.
Even if one blindly accepts your citations from "The 700 Club" and some random post from "Nitter" as authoritative, even they provide zero evidence for that claim.
Big claims require compelling evidence, and you haven't provided any.
You debate like that Chase email explains their reasoning.
The media not reporting it is certainly not evidence, down that path lies true crazy.
This being said this approach is a pretty wild one still, since people NEED banks, and there should be long duration till the expiration (except in cases of fraud, money laundering, ..)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/natwest-meets-quart...
From the Guardian 30 July 2023: <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/30/uk-banks-cl...>:
"Farage used a subject access request to discover that, despite initial denials by NatWest subsidiary Coutts, his political views had played a part in the closure of his account."
No, a subsidiary of NatWest closed Farage's account when he no longer met the investment thresholds for the account he held. The CEO resigned for telling a journalist the above.
That's not the same thing, at all.
I believe the account closure was a business decision, but they definitely had no reason to be public about it. One good thing came out of the debacle, though: it put the spotlight on UK retail banking regulations and how they are allowed to treat customers in the first place.
Financial institutions don't like small-time PEPs. They don't net the banks anywhere near the money dictators and kleptocrats do, but are just as likely to engage in ongoing bribery due to their position in society.
0: Farage had apparently been very vocal about having an account with Coutts, and waving that thing around as a sign of ... something. For the bank, that was negative brand value.
I don't like Farage's opinions, and being a PEP only means "more eyes on you", doesn't mean "kick them out". 1) Now, if Coutts dropped the ball on something, shame on them. A good lawyer can get some good ££££ for damaging the client's business/etc. 2) If Farage didn't mean a minimum-net-worth.. that's another story.
If farage had met the requirements, none of this would have happened.
Not according to follow-up reports: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38159768
> We acknowledge that the information we reported - that Coutts' decision on Mr Farage's account did not involve considerations about his political views - turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage
That does not say that he did meet the net worth requirements. See [0], and read the article. No outlet has retracted the claim that he didn't meet the wealth requirements which is why his account was flagged for review.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/21/bbc-amends-sto...
I'm a immediate relative of a PEP. And banks treat those just like they treat PEPs.
I've banked in 4 different countries with about 10 banks total, disclosed to them the fact that I'm a PEP or an immediate relative of one, and it has never, ever caused any issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_exposed_person
> In financial regulation, a politically exposed person (PEP) is one who has been entrusted with a prominent public function. A PEP generally presents a higher risk for potential involvement in bribery and corruption by virtue of their position and the influence they may hold. The terms "politically exposed person" and senior foreign political figure are often used interchangeably, particularly in international forums.
Best I could find.
The BBC had previously reported Farage falling below the financial threshold required to be a customer at Coutts - whose website advises its clients should be able to borrow or invest at least 1 million pounds ($1.28 million) with the bank or hold 3 million pounds in savings - was the reason for the closure.But an internal review of the bank account obtained by Farage showed the private bank's wealth reputational risk committee had said his values did not align with the bank's own.
"We acknowledge that the information we reported - that Coutts' decision on Mr Farage's account did not involve considerations about his political views - turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage," the BBC said in the corrections and clarifications section of its website.
No outlets have retracted the claim that he didn't meet the wealth criteria, and nobody has claimed that Coutts lied about him meeting the threshold. In fact, every outlet that I checked today stil claims he didn't meet the wealth criteria, and that the CEO resigned because she discussed details of a client's account with a journalist, e.g. [0]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/26/business/alison-rose-natw...
Chase is will known for this in many political circles
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How many of the people waving Taliban flags or HAMAS flags in Britain have been debanked in the past month?
Palestinian aid groups do indeed seem to be getting debanked in the UK from time to time: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2005/jan/03/accounts.israe...
Actions that have been widely celebrate by the political segment of the population that often aligns with the gun control movement.
Actions that could have been curbed if the people that were attacked where allowed to defend themselves in stead of reliance on state protection that never came, and Israel is now rolling back many of their gun control provisions rightly so...
>>I think scrutiny on groups which are (a) armed and (b) make political statements is probably justified.
I think scrutiny on groups which are armed and make clear threats of violence are justified. "political" statements is a bridge to far from me, that applies to all religions.
If you are in the US, express the desire to violently "decolonize" the US or chant "from the river to the sea" then maybe you should be investigated. If you are in the US and express the desire lynch a racial group then maybe you should be investigated.
The problem here is in the US today only one of those groups is actually being investigate. The other are free the vandalize monuments, and storm the capital with out punishment of any type where by if the other group even happens to stroll near a government building they put in prison for years.
How about some equality under the law for a change? People claim they want that but in reality they dont
The original founding document of Netanyahu’s Likud party:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform...
“between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty”
When the terrorist organizations chant "From the river to the sea" they are clearly calling for the forced removal (at best) of all Jews from the land.
A political party that calls for "Israeli sovereignty between the Sea and the Jordan" it is clearly a rejection of the "2 state solution" but that is not a call for the removal of an ethnic population from the region. One critical difference here is you can disagree with that political party, vote them out of that government even, and express full support for a 2 state solution with out being raped, or killed. Somehow I doubt Hamas would allow that.
Israeli a western democracy has an actual framework of secular law and a history of respecting the rights of people including Arabs, Gays, Women ect
Hamas is a terrorist organization that has a history of authoritarian control, rape, murder, and no framework for respecting any individual rights at all, you bow to the most draconian interpretation of Islamic law or you die.
People generally don't even understand what the term "free Palestine" means, even without the "From the river to the sea" part. It's not a call for an independent Palestinian state. It's a call for a Palestinian state where Israel stands.
And we all know how that would end for just about all non-Arab Israelis.
Hamas members chanting "from the river to the sea" most certainly have genocidal intent, yes. Saying "from the river to the sea" alone - as the Likud document pretty clearly shows - doesn't make you a Hamas member nor a terrorist. There are a lot of attempts to conflate "Palestinian === Hamas", but that's sleight of hand.
I'm all for wiping out Hamas. I'm quite dubious about the possibility of doing so via armed conflict.
> A political party that calls for "Israeli sovereignty between the Sea and the Jordan" it is clearly a rejection of the "2 state solution" but that is not a call for the removal of an ethnic population from the region.
Maybe, but it's certainly a call for an un-free Palestine.
(Palestinians are rightly a bit leery of removal here; recent events have seen proposals to relocate them to the Sinai (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-30/ty-article/.p... / https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/world/middleeast/israel-e...) and a government minister suggesting nuking Gaza (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-discipli...).)
"Free Palestine",as with other short slogans (see: BLM, Defund), encompasses a range of opinions. Both genocide and the two-state solution fall squarely within it.
if they did not want to be conflated than perhaps they should have accepted one of the 5 2 state solutions proposed by mutiple parties over the decades.
Contrary to your claims I do not believe Palestinian's desire a 2 state solution in any form, instead they rejected every attempt by the UN, Britain, even the Saudi's then elected Hamas to be their official government when Israel pulled out of Gaza and allowed them to self govern...
Sorry if I press F for Doubt that they want a peaceful co-existence with Israel
It is also telling that no other Muslim nation will accept Palestinian refugees, Not Jordan, not Egypt, not even Iran...
>>Maybe, but it's certainly a call for an un-free Palestine.
Correct, it is signalling that after decades of attempted compromise that maybe a 2 state solution is not really possible. This is setting aside the fact that in reality there was already a 2 state solution where by British Mandate "Palestine" was split in 2, Jordan and Israel. However in the old adage of given in inch take a mile more was demanded...
All offers for peace have been rejected by Palestine not Israel..
Even right now, a cease fire can be easily achieved if Hamas Surrenders Unconditionally, and Free's all hostages... Hell I bet a 2 state solution would even be on the table even after all of that
I bet it would Palestine not Israel that would reject said 2 state solution.
Why lie like this? The Saudi proposal you mention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative) was accepted by Arafat, largely opposed by Hamas (surprise!), but rejected by Ariel Sharon.
"The Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat immediately embraced the initiative. His successor Mahmoud Abbas also supported the plan and officially asked U.S. President Barack Obama to adopt it as part of his Middle East policy. Islamist political party Hamas, the elected government of the Gaza Strip, was deeply divided, with most factions rejecting the plan. The Israeli government under Ariel Sharon rejected the initiative as a "non-starter" because it required Israel to withdraw to pre-June 1967 borders. In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed tentative support for the Initiative, but in 2018, he rejected it as a basis for future negotiations with the Palestinians."
> if they did not want to be conflated than perhaps they should have accepted one of the 5 2 state solutions proposed by mutiple parties over the decades.
2002 above was the last concrete proposal. Half of Gaza is under 18; they've never even had the opportunity to do so.
2008 actually, when Palestinians were even offered East Jerusalem. I seriously doubt that they'll see such an offer ever again.
Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Only if you think the ends justify the means.
At least, that is the charitable interpretation.
Oh lord, this just asks for gamification.
If there's a multi-million dollar customer and a five thousand dollar customer, who do you reckon they'd rather lose in order to reach their quotas?
"Banks are under tremendous pressure by regulators to file a certain amount of SARS (as a ratio of overall transaction activity, which is determined by the regulator - regulators have a secret bogey for each bank). A shortfall from the number expected by the regulators for a bank will result in the bank being penalized by the regulator as having an inadequate BSA program (even if the bank compliance staff reviewed the activity and didn’t find anything worth SAR reporting on). If the bank fights this censure for not filing enough SARs the arbiter of justice is the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) department of the FDIC or OCC. They rule in favor of the regulators over 99% of the time.) For example California Pacific Bank- a tiny bank serving the Chinese trading community with 200 customers and 500 accounts - was persecuted for more than 5 years for not filing enough SARs, it’s hearing with the ALJ is on YouTube. Even though racist anti Chinese comments by the regulators were unearthed in depositions, the ALJ ruling still went against the bank. Furthermore, banks are required to review ongoing activity of SAR’d customers and file follow up SARs if the “typology” of suspicious activity continues. Bank BSA policies have the requirement that repeat SAR subjects will need to have their accounts closed. Most banks therefore just file SARS on anything that matches a typology and close accounts- that’s just how the BSA regulatory system works.” [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/your-money/bank-account-s...
No wonder shit doesn't work the way it should. Reporting on numbers and percentages rather than actual incidences with audit trails leading to shell companies and tax havens and opaque offshore ownership structures.
Because that takes time and effort that meaningless "numbers and percentages" don't require whatsoever.
Automation scaling is the jackboot stamping on the human face.
I didn't experience that when I was on board of directors.
In my personal affairs I had a checking account force closed because of their auditors - not the regulators. Rumors and myths about enforcement have internal people and contractor (compliance software) going too far. No recourse individually on this behavior.
(Interac is the Canadian debit card system, owned by a network of banks, which has also branched out into person-to-person money transfers between bank accounts because we don't have Venmo/Zelle/etc here).
In the UK the first three cases in a year are free, but from the fourth onward the bank has to pay £750 [1]. It doesn't matter the outcome is - the customer could be totally innocent or the next Bernie Madoff - the bank has to pay. A customer saying "I will get the Ombudsman involved" is heard by the bank as "if we don't make this go away right now, we will get charged £750 (plus any compensation the Ombudsman may award)". It does tend to make them sit up and take notice, I hear, presumably because banks get a lot of complaints and so a large bill.
[1]: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/businesses/resolving-...
Since when is this grounds for closing an account?
Many phone systems have a thinly veiled threat about zero tolerance policies, to treat staff with respect, and in the case of certain government agencies here in the UK, that they will refer cases to the police. The same is repeated on written posters in eg doctors and dentist offices
Just a coincidence I’m sure but I find employees (especially on the phone) even more condescending and unhelpful these days
What's really behind the decision is simply risk avoidance. It's like "firing" bad customers. The banks consider it prudent business to kick anyone who might be a problem out the door. Avoiding one criminal causing issues is worth kicking out 20 ordinary honest customers.
Banks do what the government tells them to do.
They are more than happy to launder drug money, they don't care. You think they close the account of some random person who made too many cash deposits to protect themselves from the customer?
No, they protect themselves from the government who will hit them with massive fines when they "fund terrorism".
It is wonderful to hear politicians and the UN speak of our wonderful human rights, but clearly that does not extend to our ability to trade our skills, good and services in a legal manner, in our common currencies.
Now how is that for our much vaunted human rights?
Is anyone going to propose a constitutional amendment that makes banking a human right not subject to the whims and caprices of anonymous secretive unaccountable govt and banking officials?
Of course we could trade in cash, at the risk of having some "law enforcement" officials seizing our cash and asking us to prove we acquired it legally, subject to time wasting and expensive legal process which usually costs more than the amount seized. Habeas corpus doesn't apply to the cash which is why the court cases read State of New York vs $28,777 rather than State of New York vs John Doe.
In the EU some countries have placed limits on the size of payments which can be made in cash.
As for the US one has to wonder why the $10000 deposit notification limit which was made in 1970 has not been adjusted to account for inflation, which according to Google it is about $79,000 in 2023.
Those officials must have been ecstatic at the introduction of computers which makes tracking such transactions so easy.
Anyone to campaign for the adjustment of the $10000 figure to account for inflation? We want to party!!
Think of how it would improve the liquidity of banks. So much money would come flowing in in full knowledge that it wouldn'tbe subject to needless checks from nosy make busy bank and IRS officials.
However wrong the EU is on many things, at least the EU states that having a "basic bank account" is a right in the EU that cannot be denied: "If you are legally resident in an EU country you are entitled to open a "basic payment account". Banks cannot refuse your application for a basic payment account just because you don't live in the country where the bank is established.". [1]
And the European Convention on Human Rights has some implication on banks in the EU, for example when they lend money (say for a mortgage) to an EU citizen.
I'd say that that's better than a country where you can be totally de-banked and blocklisted.
I don't have any false hope but it's at least better than nothing.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...
Ah well, nevertheless.
It's federally required to exist, and services all Americans already. Basic banking services should be one of the things it is expanded to provide in a minimal, safe fashion (i.e. no loans or lending, but guaranteed electronic banking and funds transfer services).
Not having a physical address is a huge problem.
However the postal offices are now being closed.
I expect the same problem would occur with The US Postal Service shutting down branches?
Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38158144
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwibank
Specifically, what problem do post office banks have that private banks do not?
Private banks close branches all the time.
Kiwibank originally had branches at the Post Offices.
Kiwibank is left with much less branches than there were Post Offices - branches often replaced by ATMs in the wall: it has "325 Kiwibank Limited Branch and ATM Locations" https://kiwibank.banklocationmaps.co.nz/en/nzl
I presume it will take much longer in the USA for the Post Offices to close. There is no reason something similar won't happen there - the same economic forces occur in the USA.
Note that most franchises are an in-store counter or small area set aside for the Post Office supplies. I can think of franchises in book-stores, stationery shops, pharmacies, and even a public library. I know of one Post Office branch of that 79 that remains open, however it is mostly run by unpaid volunteers including a friend of mine (no banking counter).
That alone exceeds the requirement of “minimal” as there’s now a need to hire staff for fraud monitoring, handle disputed transactions, chase fraudulent transfers, deal with those who forgot their passwords to electronic banking, had their passwords stolen, etc.
What are the new revenue channels that will pay for all that extra staff (and considering it’s USPS, their pensions)?
The federal government, unlike most other entities, does not need to match new revenue to new spending. It can and does create new money for any spending it deems worth it.
Funding basic banking for all through the USPS is worth it.
Yes, that is called inflation.... how is that working out for everyone that needs food, housing and energy?
Government spending on useful services, or helping their constituents get by on two one-time $600 payments did not create the current economic climate.
So you believe government only ever spends on Useful services? Some how I bet you can point to more than a few things government spends money on you disapprove of and consider to be less than useful
>>helping their constituents get by on two one-time $600 payments did not create the current economic climate.
Nice gas lighting, the reality is the 2 $600 payments make up something on the order of like 1% of covid spending, and I have a problem with all of it. Not just the direct payments.
That said it my be a shock to you that in some ways, to some people, I dont believe the government paid enough, not because I have this false narrative that somehow it is government job to help people "get by" it is not. However it is their responsibility under the 5th and other amendments to the US Constitution to compensate people when they take property. Shutting down the entire economy, barring people from working, and barring people from engaging in "non-essential" commerce should be viewed as a taking and thus require the government to make everyone whole from which they took.
now of course I also believe the government massively over stepped its authority and should have never shut down the economy, and does not have the power to do any of the things it did...
>>collusion, and government loan fraud,
Those are illegal activities, where is your government in prosecuting them? Ohh that is right they do not prosecute crimes anymore I forgot. How is that defund the police movement working out....
Things would have gone better if the PPP loan money was spent on keeping the working public solvent. People who weren't allowed to work shouldn't have been forced into unemployment, more or less, without adequate compensation.
But I also see the whole thing as evidence that our viral protocols and our ability to deliver clear, accurate information that won't be politicized, is essentially moot.
If it were rabies that was this airborne, we'd all be dead.
Does a car with 4 wheels exceed requirements of minimal? Who operates a payment service without handling fraud? Can you operste a postal service without handling fraud?
> pay for all that extra staff?
Do roads create revenue?
Like you are fee to argue that its not worth it, but government services do not need to charge fees, rhey can create economic growth and get the money back through taxes
I mean, yes? 3 should be enough without too many design changes. 2 with a kick stand. Even 1 with tech that absolutely cannot fail or else catastrophic failure.
This comes across as a bait and switch - clearly no-one calls vehicles with less than 3 wheels cars.
There is no requirement that the service be revenue-neutral.
Hell, they're even surprisingly used to keeping large amounts of valuable paper safe. It wasn't that long ago that you could make a lot of money stealing stamp sheets.
Walmart or 7-11 or so? Jokes aside, giving banking licenses to retailers might be a sensible thing to do. (Or removing the whole system of banks requiring licenses altogether would be even better.)
https://www.consumerreports.org/banks/is-banking-at-walmart-...
"At its more than 4,600 in-store MoneyCenters, as well as online, millions of customers have access to basic, low-cost banking services, including the ability to withdraw cash, make deposits, and pay bills."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
Before the FDIC was created to cover bank runs & closures, the USPS was proposed to expand into being a postal savings system, a system that was already done by the UK beforehand & had proven to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, explicitly gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." A few lines earlier the same article grants Congress the power "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States." Would it then seem odd for the Congress to be assumed to have the power to create postal bonds, so common in much of the world?
[Addendum]
Might not be such a stretch then to imagine a Postal Savings System or something similar with great reach in the US, potentially encompassing much of what commercial banks handle today. The advantages including stability and availability, and perhaps even efficiency. Perhaps Hyman Minsky might have wished for things to... go postal?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Post_Bank
[4] https://www.lapostegroupe.com/en/banking-accessibility-la-po...
Are you talking about a specific law, or about the clause in your constitution?
If the latter: the postal clause merely gives congress some powers, but does not require them to do anything.
The documents they need to open a bank account (plastic residence permit, address registration certificate) are not available to them, sometimes for up to a year.
The ways around it are poorly documented and change often as German banks tighten their KYC requirements.
I find the money transfer system created in Malaysia to be interesting. It started as a transfer system between banks, then an e-wallet that you can use to pay in stores, then they added a Visa card, then they integrated with Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand where you can pay locally with your MYR wallet. Now they added a remittance service that basically acts as a SWIFT transfer (though it looks expensive). It seems like they have found a way around the KYC rules. I wonder how long they can keep at it before they get hammered and if they can increase their Fx integrations to more countries.
But there are also other requirements that are not related. The most effective workaround at the moment is to choose a EU bank outside of Germany. This skips the requirement for a residence permit or a registered address, so people can land in Germany with a functional bank account.
Another workaround is to rely on branch employees to be a little pragmatic and let immigrants open an account. These exceptions are naturally impossible to document, but they are a normal part of German bureaucracy.
A third and last workaround a symbiotic relationship between a relocation consultant and a bank employee. They expedite the process and in return they get a steady stream of high-income customers.
For the record, I am far from a "crypto bro." I understand all of their limitations, including high volatility. I am arguing that their value is quickly growing in relation to their risks.
Except, unless cryptocurrencies are tied to some brain implant so you cant lose the keys. There will be a need for a custodian for the average joe's key...and banks 2.0 here we come.
I'm not claiming crypto is better or more convenient today than banks. At least not for most people. My premise is that they will become more valuable over time relative to their risks and limitations.
In the counterfactual world where money laundering is explicitly legal, crime becomes far harder to prove, the government is far less useful at stopping crime, and people spend more of their time inventing parallel structures to stop crime that are far less accountable than the government is, until we've sleep-walked into anarchocapitalism.
None of this excuses 'debanking' of course. In the case of debanking, you aren't being accused of the crime of money laundering, the bank just thinks you might be, so they summarily execute your account in the same way that Google executes[1] spammers. The thing you need to be angry about is the weaponization of freedom to associate, and you need to be calling for common carrier regulation rather than legalizing financial crime.
[0] Theoretically, at least - the CIA and NSA have fought tooth and nail to get full take, which is disgusting
[1] Metaphorical, at least until 2035 when Google starts livestreaming executions of known spammers
But that's not true. If it's not a deliberate attempt to hide fraud/theft but otherwise looks like actual money laundering, then it is still a crime, at least according to current KYC/AML laws. That's the real problem with this all. That's what makes the debanking problem (which you agree is bad) so easily ignored by law makers and law enforcement.
Totally wrong direction.
> "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be.
This goes back to this weird fetishism where people think it was oh-so-cool to arrest and convict Al Capone for "not paying taxes" instead of convicting him for his actual crimes.
A society which thinks its cool to send people to jail for tax evasion instead of sending them to jail for organized crime is a failed society.
Anyway, wasn't the tax evasion also an actual crime? It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?
Tax evasion is what did Al Capone in. Because the bar to prove that he was involved in a lot of seriously criminal activity was quite high, but proving that he committed tax only required proving that he had undeclared income.
Al Capone was guilty of running a massive criminal organisation responsible for many many crimes (very difficult to prove due to structures of organised crime). He was also guilty of massive tax evasion (a crime carrying serious jail time), because it turns out it's hard to pay the right tax bill when you're trying to hide the income from your massive criminal enterprise.
The Capone tax case wasn't some made up crime to try pin him. He committed serious tax evasion, which would also carry severe penalties if you or I did it at that scale with legitimate income.
Doing anything to intentionally avoid triggering scrutiny policies is a crime, even if you're not doing anything else wrong.
Unfortunately, we run into the same problems as DMCA where hugely powerful, essential corporations run into poorly crafted laws that don't function at scale, and small users that never did anything wrong get shafted.
Deputizing the banks to spy on me just makes those banks obligated to the same rules.
Money laundering is a crime predicated on the idea that the money I rightfully own is something they should be able to confiscate from me on hypothetical crimes, and they're attempts to seize it often cause people to try to make it less suspicious to the government. It's bizarre.
If they wanted to fight organized crime, the simple way was always to legalize cocaine, meth, and heroin, and sell that shit out of liquor stores in plain retail packages, all manufactured by regulated pharmaceutical companies that would produce it for a fixed, low profit-over-cost, in measured doses and free from unsafe adulterants.
Government causes problems with bad laws, blames the problems on the criminals, then makes more bad laws to punish them for it, causing more problems. As it is now, it's illegal for you to own and possess cash, though they tend to ignore it as long as you don't keep any in tempting amounts (typically less than $1000).
For example, I was living and working in Ukraine and without some sort of.. let's call it instruments... I would not have been able to get my money in the clear and legal into the western bank. Because obviously all money earned in Ukraine could only be made criminally, no way a ukrainian programmer could earn some. Must be a criminal.
One western bank even told me in private: "we do understand stealing a train of coal and laundering bribes from Ukraine, this is common and the risk is clear for us; but we have no idea about your IT stuff and things, it scares us".
Of course, it's getting easier today in some ways but good luck exporting any substantial amount of money from Ukraine into the world and in the clear. Practically impossible without some help of money laundering services.
Now I expect to be downvoted to hell because the everyday reality of being from a third-world country is incomprehensible to American people so it must be me in the wrong.
I'm not event sure that we, as a society, actually did decide that. When, how? Was there a vote, a referendum? I cannot speak for everyone, but to me it feels like we as a society sure as fuck didn't decide anything. Yes, somebody decided that, but we as a society never were a part of the conversation, really.
It’s not criminalized. If it were, you’d go to jail instead of just having your account closed.
The real problem is that politicians made banks liable if an account is used for laundering, so naturally banks terminate accounts that look suspicious in order to avoid getting fined.
Nothing crazy about it. All those KYCs, checks and check on checks have nothing to do with money laundering or any other sort of illegal activity but it has to do with control over YOUR money.
Notice how extremely regulated the industry is? So multi-billion dollar scam ventures just can't exist under this pressure, right? Multi billion dollar dodgy deals with money laundering? They should have disappeared if my $500 txn gets so much attention, right?
Wrong - it's blossoming. One may ask how - and the answer is on the surface and it has nothing to do with money laundering.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
United States currency is legal for all debts public and private (it says so on the notes), but that doesn't mean it's required to be accepted for all debts.
But a restaurant bill generally isn't going to be a 'debt' in that sense... if they only take credit cards and you don't have one after already eating your food, they're just going to write it off and ban you from the premises.
Restaurants that require payment before providing food have more flexibility.
So I think you’re right, even though it sounds like a minor distinction.
If you pay before (ex. grocery store), they can refuse to accept certain payment methods.
If you pay after (ex. restaurant), you've already eaten the food and now you owe a debt.
Say that officially your steak costs one million dollars, but if you pay electronically, you get a discount down to 20 dollars.
If you want to pay in cash, that will be one million dollars, please.
Capital One used to have a cafe near Boston Commons, although they accepted all card networks. I think it would be pretty neat if they opened coffee shops sponsored by CC companies that only accept their CC customers (e.g. coffee shops that only accept Visa or only accept Amex).
Eg Some people are rude, but that shouldn't be illegal.
Open multiple bank accounts at different banks, use services like wise.com for transfers, and limit your overseas spending with American cards to only a credit card issued with a bank that isn’t the same as your primary accounts.
Yay, patriot act. Glad we have so much energy focusing on legit bankers instead of the crypto that is actually funding multiple US adversaries at this very moment
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
E.g., use it to donate to sci-hub, ...
...
It definitely has a use case.
I mean, I'd love to change my snarky one-element list to a zero-element list!
Let's not forget Crypto mining has a not insignificant energy footprint, and is a driver of climate change. Really, detrimental to society from the get-go.
So do casinos and Las Vegas. Its basically the same thing
https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
You just submit that you already paid taxes on that income to a foreign government and then no additional US taxes (to a limit, I beleive).
To which state would one owe taxes to since you're no linger a resident?
Similarly, Americans abroad vote, but ppl in DC (not a state) cant?
Can I avoid state taxes by sojourning in DC before moving abroad?
Generally the rules will be something like you remain a tax resident of your old state, regardless of how long you stay abroad, until you establish a new permanent tax residency (whether in a new state or country).
What I eventually did is return to the US, sign a 1 month lease in Florida so I could get a drivers license and register to vote, and then return abroad. According to my tax accountant, that was enough.
Canada's rules are like that and I like it!
It's not like we give up everything but leaving the country.
And your citizenship allows you to get visas/dual citizenships that you wouldn't have access to if you weren't an American citizen. An American passport is pretty valuable, even if you don't live in America.
This is all less relevant if you move to, say, the EU, but it's still worth noting.
The only one, guys.
If your property tax keeps going up but nothing gets better in town, are you gonna trust the tax man?
If you want better service, there are two ways. One is to be an ultra high net worth individual. But the threshold for that is pretty high - from what I recall, real private banking nowadays starts around $5M to 10M in assets with a single institution. The term "millionaire" doesn't mean as much as it did in the 1990s.
The other option is to go with a small local bank or a credit union. If you're in a CU with 10,000 members, it's a lot easier to resolve problems or discuss unique circumstances.
1: https://www.us.hsbc.com/checking-accounts/products/premier/
HSBC operates a bit like a franchise, each country's branch has to abide by domestic regulations but internally customers with Premier status are basically VIPs and get expedited during account opening at overseas branches. If I remember correctly, they generally take into account all of your assets with the bank including e.g. loans and mortgages etc. when banking. They don't only look at your cash assets when conferring Premier status. So if you have a house or car loan with them you can easily attain Premier.
"Expats" is also used for elderly retirees moving to the Costa Del Sol, so IME it's not a particularly high-income or white-collar term.
Now, if you were talking about "non-doms" that would be a different matter :)
Of course, I agree that a bank accustomed to dealing with expatriates would probably be understanding of someone spending a lot of time in another country.
Expats are all English when they are outside the UK - be they retired in Spain or living / working in Dubai / Asia / Australia.
That being said, if you know when are are leaveing,.where you are going, and when you will be home, you can often put a vacation note on your account, and then the bank will know you are on vacation. That is what I did when I spent this summer in Japan, using.my bank debit card because it has no foreign transaction fees, the whole time.
We must reside in different countries. Being in USA, I observe we did drop enforcement on the southern border.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/23/kama...
"... administration has ended the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocol, a policy that forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico as they await their court hearings, and has halted construction on a wall ..."
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-border-wall-material-auct...
It's like USA personality changes every few months, and there are unlimited funds for these games.
I’ve had zero problems. I think we’re all getting excited about anecdotes.
The only time a compliance officer has been in touch with me was when I was moving money to crypto exchanges.
I've been doing it for the last 7 years without any problems.
Keep your US address on there and VPN (though frankly I’ve never needed to for anything other than Charles Schwab) and you often glide through unnoticed.
Amex are less accepted because they have a higher processing fee.
What all the people profiled in the article have in common is that they were depositing money in "suspicious" ways.
Turns out my ATM card worked fine while I was over there. I did let the bank know I would be there and I kept my address in the US though. My card got locked at one point which was a disaster since it was strictly a cash economy. I put the card into an ATM that was apparently being serviced or something. I had to get on Skype (remember Skype?) to call my bank to straighten it out. Once they gave me the go ahead I tried the next day only to be denied again. Turned out Visa wanted to talk to me as well. Thankfully they did not cancel the card, I have no idea how I would have gotten a replacement.
Since I told the bank ahead of time that I was going to be going many places the ATM card worked all over the place: Yemen, Dubai, Qatar, Turkey, Greece, Malta… Everywhere except China lol. Had to use my credit card there.
I am just average white US citizen who was working on oil rigs but most likely some of my whatsapp/facebook/iMessage contacts were related to families involved in dissidence against the Saudi government (because the oil region of Saudi is populated by a minority Shia group that is severely underrepresented in governance). Their mosques also had individuals with mental health issues who occasionally try to bomb the mosques in a very, very similar parallel to school shooters back home here in USA.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_Security_Screening...
However, this means that something changed with regards to perception of Palestine. My initial thought was that someone too important got banned from Chase.
Funny you criticize crypto, when it actually solves all the bullshit you're mentioning.
It's so nice knowing for a fact that when I send or receive crypto, it will 100% arrive within moments, unlike the absolute shitfest that is international transfers (like SWIFT).
Crypto today is the only way how you can take control of your own funds.
What use is the money in your Bank account if the ruling political party can label you an ultra-right extremist and retroactively lock all your money down, just because of a single 1$ donation you did to a cause you believed to be right, like Canada did?
> Even a $20 donation to the Freedom Convoy after Feb. 15 could result in the donor’s bank accounts being frozen, a Commons committee heard Tuesday.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/even-small-donation-t...
Nitpick: about half the time (on sufficiently long term average), they'll instead label you a ultra-left extremist (most infamously anti-COMINTERN initiatives in the 1930s-1950s, but it tends to wobble back and forth depending on what's politically convenient).
Well, digging a hole in the forest and storing money there technically remains an option.
May be more viable than crypto for certain rare use cases.
Sure, there are problems with banks and goverment overreach, but those need to be fixed, not completely replaced with a worse alternative.
It's very hard for any layman to gleam even surface level tech info from the news, politicians etc. because any statements from politicians are by definition influenced by lobbyists.
Senator XXXX not understanding (or feigning ignorance) of a tech issue has nothing to do with the color tie the politician is wearing. Democrats and republican parties are for-profit businesses that aren't a part of our constitution, and are lobbied by the tech industry to lie to you.This is all public information.
Fun fact I love to reiterate: Neither of the major party presidential candidates in 2016 knew how to use a desktop computer IE; windows, keyboard, mouse. But they both have made millions from investing in tech. But they would not know how to make a cursor move in windows 11. That should be a terrifying signal about our politicians and the effect they have on downstream tech-thought.
Those are covered by local laws. What protections do you think are missing from crypto that is different from other areas?
Maybe if you're talking about Monero or another currency with the key security property of untraceability. Otherwise it's only a matter of time until cryptocurrency exchanges require documentation about the sources of money, which will likely resemble a parallel blockchain that carries wallet metadata.
Make sure to hold my bag for me.
He's not wrong
There should be more enforcement on dubious banking transactions, numerous Australian banks have had some big fines because they were literally facilitating money laundering on cartel-scale amounts of money for years. Makes me cringe when they crack down on a Joe Nobody who's obviously not, at even a quick glance, some kind of mule / druglord.
By crypto I'm assuming you mean USD.
Not only USD, but actual US weapons in the hands of US adversaries.
Sigh.
Last I heard, wise.com is outright stealing people's money now.
Otherwise, this is a good heads-up. Banking for expats can be tricky; a lot of US financial institutions don't want to service customers who live overseas, and will automatically cancel your account if they find out you don't live in the US.
The US is looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, where people weren't allowed to leave. Even China doesn't have this problem; there are tons of Chinese expats living in democratic nations, and they don't have problems like this.
I’ve moved the majority of my money out since it feels like they might fold soon, there’s just a lot of things on autopay with that account so it’s kind of a hassle to move everything off.
Anecdotally it definitely also seems to be related if you deal with the third world much, as the linked OP below and myself are. Luckily the worst I've come across is arbitrary extra KYC popping up exactly as I'm needing to do time-sensitive transfers.
Good thread on recent events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38069117
Thank you for the thread link
Of course, that doesn't help if you don't just look weird but actually are weird. Spending a lot of time overseas is not weird in itself, because it's common enough. Some specific international situations are weird. Because such situations are rare, it's not cost-effective for the bureaucracy to develop processes for dealing with them fairly.
Banks are about to lose more trust, and money. I'll be doing some research into my credit union as well. Can't trust these institutions, man.
The only catch seems to be that I had to buy a share in the company that I assume they make interest on later. Seems fair enough, and I haven't heard of anyone's account being closed randomly, at least not yet.
The onus should not be on us to fit their model, but on them to fit their model to reality.
Wise is like Paypal 2.0. If you sneeze the wrong way, they'll freeze your account.
Protip: chill.
I have never in my life seen someone identity a problem and then blame the solution this quickly.
Also, if you get flagged in one of these services, they usually send your info to similar companies and they either close your account or don't let you create new accounts.