I find this one of the most telling bits of this entire article. It says the quiet part out loud - people are often not looking purely to understand. People want information so they can negotiate, reason, or argue with the decisions.
A bank account nowadays is not some kind of privilege which can only be granted citizens which hold the correct political beliefs and have never upset whatever stupid algoritm they have in place to check for "money laundering". A bank account nowadays is simply a modern prerequisite.
Let me be clear, if the bank "freezes" someones account, I think they are in moral right to use violence against bank officials in self defense. The bank has attacked the individual in a meaningful way, akin to digital sabotage, but way worse.
Right, it is incredibly divisive. So is freezing the bank assets of someone, which can endanger their lives at worst and at the minimum causes major distress.
I think it is important to highlight that if you're working at a bank, certainly at a high position, but also everyday clerks, you are lackeys for an organisation that threatens the lives of other people. Those people can choose to retaliate when your organisation gives them no other recourse. It is a fact. Maybe the banks should hire armed private security companies to safeguard the well being of their lackeys?
After all:
- How are you supposed to hire a lawyer to help get your account back when your account is frozen.
- How are you supposed to buy groceries to feed yourself, and your family the within possibly the next few hours. Not everyone has a fully stocked pantry.
- How are you supposed to buy life-sustaining medical supplies to for example a diabetic?
- How are you supposed to pay rent?
Within 1 month, a debanked person will be completely at the whims of being saved by friends and other alternative support networks. They are essentially robbed of everything. 1 month in a bureaucratic context __is nothing__. An issue with frozen bank accounts can take years to resolve, if they are even resolved?! The bank may choose to not give out the money in cash, and may require another bank to receive the funds by wire. What if no other bank takes in this debanked person?!
So when people talk about how divisive it is to mention the absolute animosity that these people will feel towards bank personell of all levels, ask who started it.
And most importantly, if you can't hire a lawyer, you can't buy groceries, you can't pay rent, you can't even buy gas for your car. Your family is standing in line at a homeless shelter, and your kids are crying. What remains other than desperate violence against people you feel are responsible for putting you in this hell of an existence? If you work at a bank, quit now. Don't wait until you've got blood on your hands because you've been a lackey to an inherently anti-human organisation such as a bank. If you continue working for the banks, even as a private contractor which might be the audience of people reading this, you're potentially in the firing line of very desperate people.
And those desperate people are right to be desperate. History doesn't usually change just because someone "filed a complaint", it tends to need to get really bad, and bloody.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/19/nigel-farag...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/natwest-meets-quart...
> The algorithmically generated alerts are reviewed every day by human employees.
At 1.8M reports either banks employ an army of reviewers or there is fuck all of a review.
> or wire transfers with banks in high-risk countries.
Sounds like something ripe for discrimination against immigrants.
Try to explain to your employees how their salaries are delayed because your bank suspects you’re terrorists or something.
This and some other experiences turned me to someone who believes that the freedom to transact is an inalienable right, and that it should be taken out of the hands of governments and centralised institutions as much as possible.
I had a small business bank account, and one day I got a call from the bank asking to go through my transaction list and provide explanations for all the transactions. Fortunately they didn't close the account, but given the fact that it was costing them to investigate my account, it did make me wonder if they would have closed it if it wasn't profitable enough.
(b), (c), (d) force banks to wage war against cash. So, if you have a small business that accepts cash, your bank doesn't want your business as a customer, as they don't want to accept cash deposits, nor do they want customers who withdraw cash regularly. That's why large retailers have their own shadow banks to get around the push towards anti-cash.
* no industry likes regulation (except as a weapon against competition)
* banks previously made billions helping criminals
* now the government says "stop helping criminals", so they invented a system that will inconvenience voters until the government gets off their case
They probably know equaly bad the customers whis accounts they do not close.
Both banks and the banking regulation is a joke. They could certainly do some more manual verification of suspected cases to clear out the obvious mistakes, but they only care about the bottom line and to not be fined.
Banks obviously! Crime and corruption departments are costly. If you are an actual millionaire they will make a 40 pages report on your political views before kicking you but if you are a small customer paying rent that happens to have a funny name or withdraw cash too frequently its better to just kick you out of the platform... and have you talk to the algorithm.
Think of it. If government wants to efficiently catch financial crimes they can instead setup a digital-nomad-crypto-friendly-bank-with-minimal-kyc-plus-eresidency-and-offshore-companies and just follow the money. I suspect this will be a lot more efficient than the current framework.
Banks are locking the capacity of an individual or group of people to interact with society and their access to basic living needs while making a mockery of the concept of innocent til prove guilty we built our societies on. The burden to prove you are not a criminal is on you.
And while vast majority of people are vocal against xenophobia and racism when its the banks ruining someone life because they have the wrong passport color some people will applaud and justify the systems protecting their sweet homeland from dirty barbarians from the east and south.
But even if you think AML laws are a force for good you need to agree this whole situation is very fucked up. I'm normally very against regulation but bank accounts in current digital society should be granted as a basic right.
Despite the article and the comments, this isn't an American thing. There are stories on line that are near identical to these from all over the world.
Justice is never applied evenly.
Yet, Chase did not do anything against Bernie Madoff for decades [1]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jpmorgan-madoff-deal-idUS...
central banks suck. rich get the benefit of doubt. everyone else gets rugged capitalism treatment.
This is the biggest reason I make it a priority to bank locally and in person.
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.
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 come in the future, have already & will provide.
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.
"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..."
#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.
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.
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 ...
Recent events show even in our liberal democracies, governments can't be trusted with the power they already have, and the enormous power that technology does and will afford them.
(The most salient example is the Trudeau government freezing the bank accounts of trucker donators.)
i read through most of the article and could not find discussion of such an obvious question
do you get to re-open your account after they realize they're wrong? does this actually affect credit scores? big if true. i realize this is probably just a bug due to security theater with unwillingness to fix the bug being part of the security theater.
we already knew the bank polices every single transaction we make (which is absolutely intolerable and should be illegal, along with most of the credit system which is also just surveillance), but closing accounts in any meaningful way would be new.
and this is another dipshit article that doesn't actually even name the problem. instead they point to unprovable discrimination as usual. NO. the problem is that what someone does with their money is a private matter, like none of your fucking business. there wouldn't be any discrimination if the bank just was a real product and not a one sided """relationship""" which is just code for "we shove our noses into every transaction you make for your own good, loser".
what i imagine is that in actuality what actually happens is you have to do a bunch of annoying phone calls and "security" crap like going on a website and doing captchas, receiving 6 digit codes through SMS, whatever new security theater fad is current like spinning around in front of a camera, etc then you get your account re enabled.
Estimated yearly cost of KYC/AML worldwide: $180 bn. Money actually frozen (frozen doesn't even mean it's going to eventually seized): $12 bn. 15x less. Complete, total and utter failure.
Basically these KYC/AML rules are profoundly unjust and overwhelmingly only affect honest people who did exactly nothing wrong.
The situation is so bad that there even the EU is now trying to rectify things a bit.
Here's a recent article I read (in French):
https://paperjam.lu/article/liste-contacts-ouvrir-compte-b
The article says this:
"ABBL a échangé avec la Commission de surveillance du secteur financier (CSSF) pour que la réglementation AML/KYC s’applique de manière proportionnée, en conformité avec les textes. L’obligation de diligence variera dans son intensité selon les risques effectifs que peut représenter une structure."
Basically: discussions are ongoing to make sure banks use proportionated KYC/AML rules and all the while staying within the letter of the law.
For the situation has gotten so out of hand that it's an issue for startups and individuals trying to open bank accounts and it's beginning to have a noticeable effect on the economy.
Basically 180 billions, worldwide, burnt yearly in nothing productive: only pointless administrative work. It's not helping poor people. It's not helping the economy. It's helping nobody. It's leeches leaching all the while making everybody suspicious and scared that their accounts are going to be closed.
An example: the association of parents at my kid's school wanted a bank account. We're talking about a non-profit with a yearly budget of few thousand dollars. Due to crazy KYC/AML they couldn't.
That is not "proportionate". And some of the demands were likely not in accordance with the law.
For example I've had sites, to verify my identity, which asked me to film myself while speaking (AirBnB "conciergerie" / high-end thinggy IIRC. Not sure but that "videos of yourself talking" happened to me on several sites).
I'm not sure that the EU directives regarding KYC/AML allow the collect of information including videos of people talking.
When speaking about things needing to stay proportionate, I've had a notary ask me to trace the source of funds up until 2014. Seriously WTF: there should be a limit as to how many years they can go back in time.
I bought an apartment in 2001 and I now want to sell but I'm concerned because I don't have any trace of the money anymore: it's from nearly a quarter of a century ago. I'm concerned that, before the sale, the notary (who's forced to snitch btw) is going to ask me the source of the funds used to buy that apartment in 2001 (nothing shady: I was writing computer books but I don't have any trace of any royalties payment. I don't even remember through which bank I bought it).
Another example: I did cancel a private insurance. All that was needed was a proof I moved to another country. Or so I thought. They gave me the full KYC/AML... For cancelling an insurance! Why? I take it because I moved and went living to another EU country: if you move from one country to another, you automatically become someone suspicious.
Now where it becomes really vicious: these KYC/AML always go back further and further in time but banks do not allow you to go back more than 8 or 10 years (when you want to check older statements). They then bill you hundreds of EUR, per account, per year, to give you your older bank statements. Which is adding insult to injury: the very same clique that is making your life miserable with KYC/AML is making money for the very bank statements they're asking (well, technically it's bank B asking your statements of bank A... But for another person it's going to be bank A asking that person's statements at bank B).
It's so bad I now have a Git-versioned folder only for KYC/AML with proofs of everything. Any wire transfer of more than 10 K EUR I now save and archive for posterity.
Another big issue is that none of this KYC/AML nonsense is centralized: so you basically have to do the same fucking paperwork for your insurance, banks, brokers, notary, etc.
Fuck KYC/AML. Just fuck it. This horrible, pointless waste of time and energy is bane of my existence and needs to die.
These laws/rules reflect the sick mind of those who wrote them and those who voted them (and they're badly failing at actually freezing and seizing drug/terrorist/trafficker' money).
No bullshit fees. I can get to a real person quickly. No stupid algorithm running in the background ready to banish me the moment something unusual happens.
There are legitimate reasons to use a bigger bank, but I'd wager that for 90% or more of people, a credit union would be a net improvement.
Ah well, nevertheless.
It's increasingly clear that automating important decisions like this is causing a lot of harm while removing most forms of recourse available to those affected. Coupled with the way automated decisions are used to perform and then launder fraud on a massive scale, maybe we should target laws at the automation itself: Require decisions made by automated systems of any kind to be auditable and explicitly define what human is held responsible and what remedies can be applied
It's already highly anti-democratic, but imagine what an aggressive, oppressive government will do with this power.
Standardized testing and remote learning monitoring, automated sentencing software, and any number of social programs are examples, if you were wondering.
So, part of the problem is the signalling that the tolerating of these practices when they happen to those less able to defend themselves presents to companies. "Go ahead, do it, you'll get away with it." I tend to think: because the people with the power to stop it benefit from it.
1. Opt out of these things as much as you can. Often times you can't opt out of the underlying actual thing (school, banking, etc) but you can opt out of the terrible new thing. You don't need to explain to people a deep "why". Instead give the people polite, reasonable (and generally true) excuses. "Oh, it doesn't work on my computer". "Oh, I don't understand how to use it." "I don't really like technology."
2. Help other people, particularly children, the elderly, the vulnerable, etc, in opting out of these things and bypassing them when needed. Help them fill out the paperwork, call the right people, cause the right fuss. Frequently, you'll find by helping one person they'll go on to help other people do the same thing.
3. Tell other people, in appropriate times and circumstances, that you don't care for these things and opt out of them. Don't be weirdly obnoxious about it, but when someone gripes about it or complains about it not working for them.. just agree with them. Most people don't like these things. These things don't generally work (for anyone). They suck. Let other people know you agree with them that these things suck.
There are cases where this doesn't work - automated account closures, automated sentancing, rent shenanigans. You can of course do the usual things of bugging your congress critters (and you should) but you should also use the full range of pressure available to you. Don't do business with shitty companies - and when they inevitably try to sell to you, tell them why you don't do business with them. When a politician supports automated sentancing tools, explain to them why you aren't voting for them.
Surprisingly a little bit of pressure goes quite far.
Interpreting such results is a job. Disputing such results in a court, or with an arbiter, would be really hard, unless you're a practitioner of the pattern-recognition craft yourself.
Some of best examples are the juvenile and and family court systems in a state like Ohio. Not only do they not even TRY to do what is fair or right, they have one simple mandate, pay for their own existence. As soon as the system set up to punish children is made to profit off those same children you have a sick and broken system but thats where we are today. So, VERY little chance we are going to convince a company to make less money for the social good when even out children's courts are run like a business.
As with any classification system though, 100% accuracy isn't going to happen. But there's always some customer service rep that can look at the details of the account, and see why in the world the system said what it did. But a detailed explanation of why we thought something was fraudulent could (and sometimes would!) just lead to another fun reddit post where someone describes how to hide the fraud a little better.
For any given system like this, how much harm is actually being done, vs how much is being prevented (as fraud just leads to raising prices to cover for it: financial companies are not charities)? I've read way too many CSR conversations where a blatant fraudster with world-class chutzpah would claim that we were destroying their family for no reason, when the data was damning. But this doesn't mean that everyone who isn't a fraudster really reaches out to the CSRs, and has the energy to prove there was no fraud. The actual levels of damage are just hard to measure.
We should have sensible, mandatory, available customer service access, which costs just enough to access to not be hammered by bots, but that is completely refunded in case of error. But what is really causing this is that many companies have lowered the barrier of interaction so much that we are letting a lot of fraud through the door. Remember how getting a merchant account in a real bank is a multi-day affair? How getting hired to become a delivery driver needed an interview, with a real person, and a manager checking between deliveries? The price of not having to interact with a human to sign in is fraud detection that isn't a boss you interact with every day, makes sure you are working, and is paid from the work you do. Companies with billions of customers and probably hundreds of millions of suppliers aren't exactly workable without automating a lot of those intermediate jobs away.
Maybe we made the wrong call across the board, and lower-productivity, but far higher trust commerce is the way to go... but a lot of that commerce is losing in the market, right now. So if we like it, we have to be willing to pay extra for it.
If I were in charge, it'd be too bad for your company, and they'd have to give a detailed explanation every time even if that would be the result, because the alternative is way worse.
Plenty of people in the comments here want to enforce that approach via laws and regulation..
> So if we like it, we have to be willing to pay extra for it.
.. and I wonder if they are taking this into account.
I worked for a company doing this sort of fraud detection. Knowing features and weights really would make it easier for fraudsters.
how about we stop at the actual source by not having the government launder the task of law enforcement to third parties? The article makes it pretty clear that banks aren't exiting customers for fun. They're doing it because they have to, on pain of facing regulatory action.
It isn't an automated decision-making problem. Every instance involves humans in the loop making the final decision. And that article makes clear -- via spokesperson statements -- that it is auditable and the banks know exactly why accounts were terminated.
What the spokespeople say is a claim…it’s not truth, we don’t have independent evidence of it, of course they would claim that.
Even if they did have human in the loop - what does that meaningfully look like? Are those humans given the authority to actually overrule the decision? Are they given the evidence to do so? Are they punished or perceive that they will be punished if they do?
I don’t think taking the banks answer to any of those questions at face value is responsible citizenship. Yes it’s what they said - no I don’t think that supports calling it reality.
I’ve mentioned this in other threads related to medical billing. My wife and I have had crazy medical bills for bizarre things the last few years. They are never correct, often they are basically fiction. The people you talk to just point to the bill as if it is inherently correct because it’s the bill. I’ve shown pictures of me on vacation on another continent that same day they charged me for a service…well the bills the bill. That’s not human in the loop, it’s a human shield around the automated decision making loop.
It’s a fixable problem, make incorrect billing an actual crime. It already is to mid bill the government, just not people.
This is already done for financial statements.
If you put out software that is actively causing harm, you should know your fingerprints are on it
Employees like devs would be protected by professional insurance. That would cause bad management to shape up, or otherwise lose inaurance coverage.
> human oversight policies provide a false sense of security in
> adopting algorithms and enable vendors and agencies to shirk
> accountability for algorithmic harms.
> propose a shift from human oversight to institutional oversight as
> the central mechanism for regulating government algorithms.
> First, agencies must justify that it is appropriate to incorporate
> an algorithm into decision-making and that any proposed forms of
> human oversight are supported by empirical evidence. Second, these
> justifications must receive democratic review and approval before
> the agency can adopt the algorithm.
Now, I do not know how bad fintech scene is, but I do know that they generally suck when it comes to actual BSA compliance. Then again, I do not really consider fintech banks. Neither does treasury for that matter[1].
Still, this is not THE problem even if you raised a valid and relevant concern here. The issue is and always has been BSA legislation that put this requirement on banks without specifics. More than that, the core issue is that the stupid population that was so scared post-9/11 that it let this thing pass through with minimal whimper.
Clearly, it got bad enough that it got some important people and Treasury had to issue a guidance[2]. No one cared for 2 decades.
I am sorry for the tone. I am glad this is getting a wider audience, but I do have a bee in my bonnet that it took this long.
[1]https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1105 [2]https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1438
Because it is a legislative problem of not ensuring sufficient rights, such as the inalienable right to have access to an electronic money account with which you can receive, send, and keep money.
Jokes aside, we are entering a world of AI-decision hell. If it is any similar to the algo-decision hell from the past decade, humans are fucked.
If they can do it, so can we.
Just like offshoring manufacturing and service centres to places that pay the lowest wages (even though us proles aren't allowed to buy entertainment media from those same places, but that's a separate topic)
Race you to the bottom!
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/the-gla...
Never answer with any info, never consent to searches.
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).
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.
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/...
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.
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?
Pretty sure it's a global agreement around terrorist funding.
Although I do think that the model weights and parameters should in some way be subpoenable so that the model can be 'compelled to testify' if someone has enough legal, technical and fiscal resources to sue the company.
I agree but I wanted to push back on the idea that this was somehow due to automated decisions being made. That isn't really the problem here. The same exact thing would happen if the government mandated "no computers are allowed to be involved". The problem is opaque decision making, no clear escalation path, a disregard for the short term pains, and so on.
The fundamental problem isn't how the decision gets made. Even if a human made the decision you'd have the same issues of the front line consumer support saying "well the other department made their decision, I don't know why and I don't have the authority to change it and they don't accept calls".
By talking about automated decisions, the OP is making the conversation about the wrong problem.
In the case of Google and Meta though don't confuse Customer with User. User service is not a thing.
Clearly this thread -is- about Customer (not User) Service, so I'm not suggesting that banks are the same.
Financial systems have a bot / scam / fraud problem. As others have pointed out, that is the cause of most of the human pain in that space.
The racism mention in the article is notable - this isn't prima facie racism (and certainly affects more than minorities), but it is derivative racism since "people who can actually be heard to go through the system in the right way" is race-skewed.
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.
That's what brands and reputation are for. And it works: brands often do command a premium.
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.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/employers-gold-silver-pay...
Especially since they would likely assume that the person earned this punishment and thus is a risk to employ.
Everyone has agency. “Just following orders” is not an excuse.
If someone asks you to implement something that crosses an ethical line for you, you ALWAYS have the agency to refuse. It’s hard, but it’s critical that we never give away our own agency and control of our own actions.
You may not be able to stop an implementation from going forward, but you ALWAYS have the ability to not contribute to such an implementation.
depends on your safety barrier. In some very high profile cases, depends on your life. I commend people like Snowden but I certainly wouldn't choose to spend my entire life running from the US government in an attempt to be ethical. I have too many selfish personal goals to try and attempt to sway the masses like that.
You wouldn't have to flee to Russia for refusing to ship spyware in a mobile app, for example.
(Mainland) China has regulations for milk. Including banning of chalk. Alas, those regulations aren't enforced with much teeth in practice, so consumers rely on reputation and brands. Specifically, they buy milks from oversees, like Australia, because of their superior reputation.
A big part of that reputation is that Australian companies won't be protected by the Chinese government when they screw up. So it's harder for them to hide blemishes on their reputation (at least to hide them from Chinese customers).
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.
I couldn't fill up my gas. Called and they told me to come to the bank with two forms of ID. When I arrived to the bank the fraud department was operating in NY (3hrs ahead) and they were closing, so they told me to come next tuesday (it was a long weekend).
I went homeless for 1 week with no food. It was my last semester in university and couldn't pay for tuition because my bank acc was locked, so the university dropped my classes and i was not able to graduate, as failing to stay enrolled (international student) i had to go back to my country.
- 3 days before i received a transfer from my brother (6k usd) to pay for tuiton and new place
- no unusual transactions, never reported any fraud before, just was hit with the "per our agreement we can close your account without notification." and they provided me the balance 1 week later.
I had to go back to my country, without a degree, was not able to land any job. Unfortunately, good places require degrees. Stayed unemployed, hit with chronic depression as anyone would. Lost 4+ years of professional progress. When covid came, i was able to complete my degree online and graduated in 2021, but because all fresh grad programs require a certain age; i did not qualify. Was able to finally land a good job in 2023.
This issue needs a resolution, what happened to me might not happen to everyone, i know my situation is different. but financial institutions should be held responsible for actions like this, imagine someone else who needs to pay for his/her medication...
What is not being said is that many folks are operating at the limits of their executive function. Add something like this to an already stressful period of time to such people, and they simply will not be able to advocate for themselves in an effective manner or make logical decisions in the moment.
I say this from personal experience. Small stuff like this, in particular gatekeeping kafkaesque stuff, absolutely kills my life in a way that is not logical or explainable. It effectively shuts my brain down. I've lost many years of my life due similar issues, where in the end someone else could have handled them as a minor annoyance.
The issue is banking is highly regulated but a lot of the regulation is about AML, terrorism screening and such. Not actually protecting customers from abuse but rather the other way around - banks are taking precautions to protect themselves from customers. Some of the regulation is also the result of decades of lobbying efforts by major players, making it extremely hard for new ones to compete. Banks are rarely held accountable because for some reason most regular people are fine with this or don't understand it.
There is a solution - not sure if everyone's ready to hear it yet: Decentralized finance. Good luck to a bank trying to shut down your self-hosted Ethereum wallet. Banks provide important services and will continue to exist, but giving them full unchecked control over our life savings and finance is mad. There are a lot of other issues with the current system, and many people don't really understand the contracts they're signing, including that they don't legally own "their money" in the bank account in most cases (they're creditors). But the question of effective control over ones own funds is the most crucial one to me.
All this idiocy could have been prevented by a communication stating "come here before one week or we will close your account". They simply do not care about people.
Soon we will have to stop having sympathy for people who get screwed by the banks as the alternative is just too easy and obvious.
It happened to me once in Africa, and I said "never again".
I now have a backup plan for everything that is critical for my life.
I have several modes of transportation, several clients, 2 computers, 2 sources of internet, several ways of contacting my family, etc.
System always fail.
He got stuck for about a week and a half with his money all locked up in an account he couldn't access. It was early enough in the month that rent and bills etc. wasn't an issue, we just ended up helping him out buying food for a few days while he sorted out another account and got an advance on his salary.
I remember the range of excuses and explanations for delays from the bank left us all gobsmacked.
Took us a full week to get a cheque (!!) that we could take to another bank to move all of our money there. Thankfully, I had just sold something online for cash and was able to live off that, and let my landlords and billers know that I was in the process of rebanking.
Since then I've made it one of my lifes goal to sabotage any benefits to the bank (Macquarie) since. I've so far denied them about $700k AUD in revenue by ensuring any time I see their name I shoot down the deal or find an alternative provider. Luckily they operate heavily in the commercial space. I'll continue to do whatever I can to hurt them. Fuck you Macquarie.
Stories like yours highlight how important the freedom to transact is. It’s all fine and dandy until one day suddenly it isn’t and you’re completely fucked.
This sentence is simply BIZARRE.
As an example, I'll use the public university geographically closest to me. (University of Utah)
* It requires no payment until two weeks after classes begin. [1]
* It offers monthly payment plans. [2]
* It allows for late payments, with a late fee capped at $75. [2]
This is not the exception. Much like rent, utilities, etc, there is ample consideration for interruption of tuition payment.
---
What institution is as utterly inflexible as you describe?
[1] https://registrar.utah.edu/academic-calendars/fall2023.php
Aside from the bank's fault, this is a failure of basic society functioning on so many levels.
Dropping you because you couldn't pay for tuition for one week? Having to leave the country because you failed to enroll because of that? Being homeless for a week out of a bureucratic mistake?
True it boils down to people really. Society has just a facade of being functioning, in reality it as bad as the govt, banks that it represents.
I don't see any reason why this hasn't happened except that the Fed has been captured by private banks.
"Oh I never use cash, cashless transactions take 0.00362 seconds less, so taking the risk that I become homeless is worth it to me." - followed by outrage at discovering that trusting your entire financial life to the whims of a compliance department is a real risk.
At some point, you have to assess your risks and realize that your "convenience" comes at a cost. Why people don't use cash, or at the very least have a few stacks in a safe somewhere, always floors me.
I know because it happened to me.
The fact that you became homeless, no food for one week, couldn't graduate because you couldn't pay tuition etc. all point to the same thing. BTW, colleges don't screw you over if you are late paying tuition for just one week. I know that quite well too.
When my bank closed my accounts, I was super annoyed. But I knew why they did it.
Like, can a bank legally put that they can close account without notification in their T&C? Isn't there a regulator that would control these and fine the banks?
The binding arbitration clause (or privatized justice system) is another thing that I can't believe the US population never rebelled against...
The main thing is any company can start denying you service whenever they want as long as it's not for a protected reason, and then it's up to you to prove in the court of law (or arbitration) that they didn't specifically screw you over in any particular way, which is usually not worth the hassle.
This happened to me a decade ago (not in the US), and I was surprised to find that every bank in the country had similar provisions in place. I'd be surprised if yours doesn't too.
I've been unbanked for a while due to paperwork issues in France but thankfully didn't have any life-changing consequences like you.
I would love to present to the world your story. Can you e-mail me at lepenguin.stableunit@gmail.com
Thank you.
It does feel like depository institutions should have to make your funds available the same day via wire/cashiers check/cash if they close your account in this manner.
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).
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
<hours elapse> guy emails me asking if I sent the wire because it's not in his account. I say sure did, but let me check if the funds have departed my account. This is when I discover that WF locked all my online account access. And of course they did not send the wire.
This whole mess took nearly the entire day to resolve and required me to go into a WF branch to prove I was myself. And when I did that the helpful WF manager I worked with ended up exasperated at the WF department that had locked my account. She said they ended up suspecting that she was a bad actor, even though she was calling on an internal line!
This all makes me suspect that in addition to bad ML filtering, banks also have plain moron/assholes working in their fraud departments.
(Yes I got the car eventually and my bank accounts back)
Any such attempt smells like trolling to me.
System that are shitty by accident, do not compare to intentional evil.
US banks aren't shitty by accident - how could anyone say such a thing. They deleted millions of mandatory records. They manipulate markets. They fund illegal wars, and people like Epstein. They support dictators and tax dodgers. And that's all just JPM! Look at what GMS have done; look at the Panama papers, look at the 08 bailouts.
Giving banks the benefit of the doubt requires extraordinary, profound naivety.
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...
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.My belief is their is some data science team responsible for this. They are ruining people's lives with their false positives. I hope those people read this message and realise what they are doing.
I was lucky. I would've got a marker put against me that could've had every other bank close my account. I only escaped this because of my persistence in calling them and getting lucky with a customer service rep who went the extra mile.
Beyond the specifics of closed bank accounts, what are we are seeing is the following pattern:
- Government pushes regulation on banks to monitor their customers for X, Y, Z
- Banks, on behalf of the government, collect data on individuals for X, Y, Z.
- When banks are not satisfied, they either de-bank their customers or file a report with the government.
Banks, which are supposed to work for their customers, instead end up being coerced to watch their customers on behalf of the government.
Because more and more transactions are digital, the net result if that the government has found a new venue for (totalitarian?) surveillance of almost all economic transactions of their subjects. Back in the day, the KGB would have dreamed of having something like this.
Of course, one needs to live to see how bad it will get, and if people will get more accustomed to holding cash[^1] in a hidden safe.
[^1]: Or a cash equivalent. In certain places, there is talk to make do without any cash at all.
For regulatory reasons, only the government should be able to mandate closure and for that it should be backed by a judicial order.
I don't fucking care about idiots mumbling about "muh, terrorism! money laundering", fuck you and your safetyism. We live in a democracy, and nobody should be punished except after a judicial procedure with ample defense rights.
Banks regulatory requirements should stop at making sure they collect all the required information and report suspicious activity to the government. They are not in the business of policing people, investigating, judging and punishing people. They don't have this mandate.
(a) Banks can be vague in their SAR filings with “transaction with no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose”
(b) What BSA manul says: "No bank, and no director, officer, employee, or agent of a bank that reports a suspicious transaction may notify any person involved in the transaction that the transaction has been reported." [1]
This deadly combination is enough for banks to NOT disclose. That's why a vague reason is provided by banks; here is Chase's template: "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."
[1] https://bsaaml.ffiec.gov/manual/AssessingComplianceWithBSARe...
Widespread disenfranchisement risks a quiet, at first, socioeconomic apartheid, instability, and more homeless people.
The root cause is the oligopolic concentration of power by too few corporations and regulatory capture leading to little-to-no oversight to civically murder or banish a person arbitrarily.
A number of potential remedies include:
1. Decentralization (credit unions, breaking up corporations that are too big)
2. Regulation (antitrust, consumer protection, and algorithm standards)
3. Public utilities for essential services (postal banking which already occurs partially in the US with money orders)
Closely-related book Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Silverglate.
one additional scenario that always stuck with me as to how wacky banks can stretch their power: i had a woman who had her own sole-owned accounts, a joint account with her mother, and her mother had her own accounts. the mother had overdrafted her sole account a few hundred dollars, and per the bank agreement, they took money from the joint account & the daughters sole-owned account to offset the balance. she was completely blindsided & distraught once it all became clear as anyone would be. how is that fair? this was in 2015. hopefully things have changed.
Here's what companies should be doing: using AI to easy the work of their workers.
What's the difference? Well, in this case, closing an account is a serious action. It should always require human review. Mistakes do happen. Bugs happen. So, automated systems should simply allow one person to review many more accounts and/or to require less time to review such actions.
Companies should always be responsible for the consequences of these automated actions including all damages plus punitive damages. Want to know how this can go (and has gone) horribly wrong?
Hertz had an automated system that was falsely reporting rental cars as stolen [1]. People were charged and spent time in jail for this (eg [2]).
This should never happen. Any police report like this should require human review where the human is responsible for the consequences of that. Automated system or not, Hertz made false police reports. That's a crime. Or it should be if it isn't.
We are rapidly heading towards a dystopian future where ordinary life is impossible and nobody knows why because none of these systems explain why you're being imprisoned and your money has been seized.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-marine-arrested-charged-...
People were happy when it was only "fascists" getting debanked but now it's happening to normal people they don't like it.
Wait until it starts happening to everyone that attended a pro-Palestinian rally.
>“We must know our customers and monitor the transactions that flow through our bank,” he said. “That includes instances where we see a pattern of cash deposits that are just below federal currency reporting thresholds.”
Later in the article:
>“We must know our customers and monitor the transactions that flow through our bank,” Mr. Dubrowski said, who stressed that the bank was not accusing Mr. Ladipo of any wrongdoing. “That includes instances where we suspect that the transactions involve parties connected to potential scams.”
Is Mr Dubrowski an AI by any chance?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a big claim. It should have big evidence to back it up.
Chase is will known for this in many political circles
"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...
At least, that is the charitable interpretation.
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.
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.
(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).
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".
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?
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
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?
Make sure to hold my bag for me.
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.
He's not wrong
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...
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 onus should not be on us to fit their model, but on them to fit their model to reality.
The only time a compliance officer has been in touch with me was when I was moving money to crypto exchanges.
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.
What all the people profiled in the article have in common is that they were depositing money in "suspicious" ways.
Protip: chill.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve had zero problems. I think we’re all getting excited about anecdotes.
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.
I have never in my life seen someone identity a problem and then blame the solution this quickly.
Wise is like Paypal 2.0. If you sneeze the wrong way, they'll freeze your account.
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.
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.
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).
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)?
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.
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.
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 once had my card declined buying groceries, which ultimately took several hours to unlock. The cause? The $1.25 transaction for the fancy air compressor at the gas station to fill my tires. No biggie, had to re-shop when my card was eventually unlocked a few hours later by their slack-ass fraud department.
The second story, I once had my card declined purchasing groceries and found my account was -$750 dollars or so. An old gym I had cancelled my membership was acquired by another firm, and this new firm apparently thought I was still a member and owed several years worth of $54 a month fees. Now, instead of doing (3 * 12 * 54) in a single transaction, or $54 transactions 36 times they just started hitting my account for $100 in serial, then for some reason switching to $50 in serial, and then $25 in serial until I was comically in the hole. The bank manager was able to freeze and deny further charges from the firm, initiate a fraud complaint, and ultimately had my money back in a week. Thankfully I had some cash in my safe for the duration.
What boggles me is they were unable to interpret a company for which I had never made a prior transaction jackpotting my account as a fraud, but Thank God they stopped my $1.25 tire pressure refill.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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
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.
> 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 !
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The “why did he do this to himself?” meme seems appropriate.
Also, yes. I’ve gotten better over the years at taking a breath and just doing it but it still sets me off. Employers exploit this in people by adding hurdles in expense systems. It’s an oft forgotten corporate dark pattern.
I don't think this can be understated. I didn't pay income taxes for two years. Not because I was dodging them, but because I was going through a divorce, single-parenthood, and depression and was barely able to hold onto my job.
2 years later, I got my shit together, paid back taxes and fees (I had the money all along), and it was easy... when I had the bandwidth for it. I just couldn't at the time.
Most things are easy in isolation, it's having patience for someone-who-can't get-your-one-simple-thing-right-because-they-have-too-many-other-simple-things-on-the-go-right-now that is hard.
Everyone's says it's easy to wake up at 4 am for a flight. Just wake up, duh.
But actually doing it is another thing.
Each account can send money to the other via wiring, but that's it.
Saved my ass several times already when I lost my credit cards or other unpleasant situations.
"Are null or void, Contractual clauses relating to the supply of products and services that [...] imply a waiver or provision of rights."
Access to justice being a right, arbitration clauses that forbid the consumer to go to the judiciary system are not valid. They can offer it, but not force it.
OTOH we did stop having sympathy for people who get screwed by crypto bros as the alternative has been just too easy and obvious for quite a while now.
One way to avoid getting out of this trap is to join the club of "private banking" services provided by big banks. It is like Airline's first class vs. economy class customers. Banks put different resources for private banking clients such as: (a) manual override by humans (b) reduce false positives by algorithms by tweaking parameters (c) specialized representatives, cust service folks.
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.
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-...
Maybe we can go back to bartering?
The useful applications of crypto are illegal (buying narcotics) and the majority of the ecosystem today is both illegal and completely economically nonproductive.
I've been doing it for the last 7 years without any problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) Funds took a while to be in my account, it arrived mid of 1st week of semester. 2) Procedures from the international students office -- they placed a hold on my account for not buying international students insurance from their provider, which is mandatory, and no you cannot buy the insurance somewhere else. note that this happened after the classes were dropped, it was possible to fix it and keep my enrollment had the bank not closed my banking account. 3) Simply because it was a capstone class (final major related class), the seats get full really fast so after being dropped of the class i was attending it became full, and even after receiving the funds, i paid the tuition, removed the holds, contacted the professors where there was available seats to allow me enrollment (have to have their sign off to enroll past a certain date) they refused to allow me enrollment (2nd week approaching third).
If the bank did not close my account, I would've paid my tuition before the deadline, paid the universities insurance, secured a shelter, wouldn't have my classes dropped.
Regardless, it is a tough experience, it taught me a lot and i came out of it stronger.
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.
and during all this banking in the US suffers from all the usual problems, it's 50+ regulatory regimes all in one, banking systems are laughably ambivalent old and legacy plus too new and full of bugs, and so on.
it's not surprising that things are not ideal. there's no need for some extreme conspiracy. big banks are user-hostile. just as the police, as healthcare, and so on.
It appears to me like a sophisticated and coordinated operation, not the accidental result of bureaucracy.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/financial-fraud-enforceme...
Nothing crazy about that. It's very harmful to women, and doesn't do the consumers of it much good either.
this has the same energy as "video games are making us killers", "tabletop RPGs directly lead to Satan (no chance of ever getting back)", "reefer madness, not even once", and so on.
are there negative consequences with regards to women? sure, as with many things.
is it "harmful to women"? oh, yes, maybe we need to put blinders on women and assign a guardian to them to help them avoid this harm!
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.
> 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...
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.
Regardless of that, you've stated that crypto can be used to buy things. The parent post said "Let's transition to cashless society". Why can crypto not be used?
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.
However, this means that something changed with regards to perception of Palestine. My initial thought was that someone too important got banned from Chase.
Amex are less accepted because they have a higher processing fee.
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.
"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.
Those are covered by local laws. What protections do you think are missing from crypto that is different from other areas?
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 ..."
So do casinos and Las Vegas. Its basically the same thing
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 applyBanks 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.
Restaurants that require payment before providing food have more flexibility.
So I think you’re right, even though it sounds like a minor distinction.
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.
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.
Sure, there are problems with banks and goverment overreach, but those need to be fixed, not completely replaced with a worse alternative.
E.g., use it to donate to sci-hub, ...
...
It definitely has a use case.
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.
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...
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."
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
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.
The only one, guys.
If your property tax keeps going up but nothing gets better in town, are you gonna trust the tax man?
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?
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.
Banks have special rules because they are infrastructure. A cafe needs a bank but not vice versa.
Strawman all you want, but there's a big difference between social media and finance.
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.
Absolutely agree. Holding and transferring money should be a basic human right.
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?
Specifically, what problem do post office banks have that private banks do not?
Private banks close branches all the time.
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.
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).
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.
There is no requirement that the service be revenue-neutral.
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.
These people in the fraud department don't even deserve to get found in a river.
Seems pretty much a no brainer to me.
The fraud departments we have are so indistinguishable from actual phishing it’s amazing. They even send you a two factor code and have you read it to them! The text says they’ll never ask for it via phone! Embarrassing.
(Maybe it has to do with being used to dealing with clients that literally have no money.)
This is a situation where the Invisible Hand of libertarianism was supposed to manifest and gently nudge people to banks with more favorable terms in such numbers that no bank is able to do this and stay profitable.
If the bank would be liable, we all suffer. How much will banks charge if we would be both secured from fraud risks and indemnified from account closure damages? I would think 1% of your cashflow would not be unreasonable.
Also as a merchant I like a pro-active attitude of the bank to deal with fraud. But, more on-topic, bank accounts are definitely more stable than CCs. But they are not immune for seizures and fraud detection.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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”
Only if you think the ends justify the means.
The branch manager who called had to authenticate himself over the phone (at least he was the one who placed the call) and waited on hold for over twenty minutes and even then he didn't talk to a specific person iirc.
The strange thing is the supervisor was clearly on a power trip. They made me waste hours of my life chasing this nonsense.
Which can be why it can be worthwhile to file suit in small claims court or even pro se.
Because then you’re in their legal department which often at least responds.
Or you get to foreclose on the local branch.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclo...
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.
"... 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."
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not to defend banks, but you know how many bugs the average large software system has?
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.
Expats are all English when they are outside the UK - be they retired in Spain or living / working in Dubai / Asia / Australia.
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.
You debate like that Chase email explains their reasoning.
The media not reporting it is certainly not evidence, down that path lies true crazy.
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.
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!”
- 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://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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
- 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.
> Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain.
I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.
(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)
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...
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
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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I want the pendulum to swing the other way. Everybody gets and gets to keep forever an account at the Reserve Bank.
> self-hosted Ethereum wallet
I'm sorry. The technology might be fine But I simply do not trust the people involved with cryptocurrency. Not just the scammers such as SBF, I don't trust the "victims" to make wise choices. They see this as a get rich quick scheme. They are not "victims". They are money hungry speculators. Most don't even host a full node. Even people who have a means to do so Such as this guy tech deals on YouTube. The miners want to turn a good profit when they should be happy to just break even. The transaction costs are still too high. It should be very close to if not exactly zero dollars. The block chain should not be a place to make huge profits. The prices should not go "to the moon". In fact, you shouldn't even be thinking of the price of your cryptocurrency with respect to the US Dollar. This already means we lose if we constantly compare Bitcoin oh sorry ethereum and the dollar.
Overhauling the financial system to ensure that citizens cannot have their accounts revoked on a whim sounds like a nice pipe dream. I am cynical we will ever see that in our lifetime, as countries prefer to have full control over their citizen's wallets (e.g. see Canada enacting Emergencies Act to curb protests).
I believe this would result in more instances of funds being frozen when under the suspicion of doing something/being associated with someone doing something illegal.
Just as Social Security was promised to never be used as a national ID, but was ultimately used as an identification mechanism[1], accounts with the Federal Reserve would be sold as a way to have a permanent bank account, but would ultimately be used as a way of implementing financial ruin upon those who choose non-compliance.
Conversely, I also believe crypto serves the same end. There is nothing a financial regulatory body would enjoy more than having every transaction take place on a publicly auditable ledger.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/26/weekinreview/the-nation-n...
Not to mention all of crypto on and off ramps are incredibly centralized.
The major ones, yes. That's because most of the decentralized ones got shut down or closed voluntarily out of fear of getting prosecuted on ML charges. LocalBitcoins is a good example, first they got their site blocked in authoritarian countries like Russia. Then they had to restrict service in some US states and other more liberal places as well. Finally they shut down operations completely.
The question is if people still want to fight for such liberties or not. There are multiple countries working on CBDCs and to abolish or at least severely restrict cash payments. In many EU countries this is already reality. For example France has a limit of 1000€ for residents.
Cash is a quasi anonymous form of payment, in self-custody. Throughout history something similar has always existed, be it metal coins or even earlier forms of money. There is a real danger as we're on our way to go fully digital to lose control over this freedom to governments and/or banks.
I guess that happened years ago and we are fully in the "and then they fight you" portion of the timeline.
Anyone without a good portion of their net worth in crypto is making a huge and obvious mistake.
For everyone whose Bitcoin wallets get stolen, there is no recourse. There is no customer service number to call, no court in which to file suit, and no service agreement over which to sue. Unless you live in some war-torn country where you don't know what government you'll live under tomorrow, putting a good portion of your net worth in an asset so easily stolen (or lost to something as banal as a forgotten encryption key) is a fool's errand.
Disambiguating the above sentiment from another context, we had a huge problem with Indian immigrants becoming victims of home invasions once it became apparent to opportunists that they accumulate and hoard large amounts of gold in their homes.
If you live in a first-world country, playing by third-world rules will pit you against third-world opponents.
Unfortunately, when trying to pick a coin, it's like trying to choose the best programming language. Each coin has its own ins and outs, there isn't one that is the best. They have their own time and place. A lot of people see this and want to use them in inappropriate places, but doesn't mean there aren't appropriate reasons for them, even if they're few and far between.
This is just wishy washy rubbish trying to appear "diplomatic" and "balanced". Oh sure, you can mint some monkey jpegs or construct a needlessly complex and public smart contract for some esoteric "use case", but the truth is the majority of people in the world don't want or need those things.
People just want a money that works. You can send or receive it instantly across international borders, that no one can stop, and it doesn't lose it's value over the years.
Bitcoin is the only game in town, the "crypto bros" just don't realise it yet because they can make obscene amounts of money from pump and dump schemes with flashy marketing about "use cases" and "yield".
Wake up or get burned, again and again.
99% are scam to be ignored, so really just looking at the oldest "coins" works.
Basically there is only BTC, BCH, XMR and ETH to choose from (of you cant tell the rest are scams that's on you).
Between those 4, BTC is a ponzi scheme for morons that doesn't really work as cash, eth is a hobby security but has equal potential to break or go to $1million.
That leave BCH and XMR, the only two cryptocurrencies that are not obvious scams.
I wouldn't say fintech or neobanks are very trustworthy. Wise, a fintech platform, blocked my company's account for four weeks for "further investigation" right after the war as well. This caused me to miss bill payments.
I think the only way to mitigate the risk of a bank taking over your funds is to not store all your money in one account. Now, I have over 20 different accounts.
It does appear necessary to spread your risk across multiple unrelated financial institutions. Make multiple bank & ccard accounts, and do not link them. Far less convenient, but should improve your safety.
Carrying some emergency cash is also a solution for this sort of thing.
Anyway lots of countries seem to think they are soon going cashless, so good luck with that.
Another good option is to have checking accounts in more than one bank. Whatever triggers bank A to close your account is unlikely to also trigger the same action by bank B. It requires more funds, but you decentralise your finances within the classic financial system.
If something triggers a close of your accounts on multiple banks at the same time, odds are you have much worse problems than access to liquidity.
Until that’s fixed, this will only get worse.
A government bank of last resort is probably something we need.
For basic necessities to modern life, there needs to be a state provided minimum quantity of access, so that you can't be screwed over by corporations just deciding you aren't profitable enough, or cornering the market and price gouging, etc.
The point is more about banking specifically though, and about taking back control. Grandpa should obviously not swap his life savings for BuzzwordCoin, it's not ready for him. But for someone tech literate like I presume the other user is, holding some emergency funds in a way they have full control could have saved them. Hopefully there will be more integration with the established financial system and easier and safer ways people can move in and out of self custody.
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.
This is from extremely hard won personal experience.
Yes, it's a lot of cash. I don't mean keep it all under your mattress.
Edit: A month of your total living expenses including mortgage/rent is what I would deem as both reasonable, and an absolute bare minimum. Not having this on hand would make me feel extremely uncomfortable as you are living at the pleasure and whims of others.
Having multiple cards would too (I have a debit card and two credit cards, kept at home, but I don't want to be stuck with no money if my wallet/phone gets stolen)
I have no idea why a university which had received multiple on time payments would suddenly drop someone off the role for paying a few days late (especially with a reasonable excuse like "my bank put my account on hold")
But cash can't be used for lots of things, even though legally it needs to be accepted anywhere. I can't imagine it would be easy to pay your $6,000 school tuition with a stack of $20 bills. You might be able to get a hotel room if you paid a hefty deposit on top of what the room actually cost, but you'd be just as likely to run into some 20 year old desk agent who can't be bothered to find the form for that, if it even exists.
We're doomed if this type of crowd sourcing of scams sets in without people noticing and calling it out.
I bought $100 of BTC about 1 year ago when it was at $24,000, just the other day it was at $34,000 and my account said my crypto was at $102. That's all I needed to know about it.
While that is true, they were redeeming them 1:1. So you could buy them at a 6% discount on the exchange, but redeem them, for free 6%.
Few people did because enough of them thought that USDT is going to the ground, causing the discount.
People don't want that. They do want their financial transactions to be stopped and reversed in the event of theft, fraud, merchant error, defective goods, unprovided services, etc. That's why Bitcoin and the other cryptos haven't caught on universally, there's no recourse when something goes wrong. (Really, Bitcoin just defines any redress as out of scope.)
Pure fantasy.
On cross-border trade that cannot be interdicted: There is no reason for any state to deny itself from sanctioning its adversaries.
On currency valuation: An economic zone has many many actors making independent decisions which in aggregate affects the value of the zone’s currency. The ability to debase a currency by over issuing it is identical to the ability to expand the supply to provide liquidity to a growing economy.
Now BCH is closer to Bitcoin and still works great. BTC is just a ponzi scheme for morons at this point
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...
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.
“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?
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.
* 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...
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.
Certainly no form of wealth storage is without risks!
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.
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.
Now I can walk to a half dozen places that won't do business with you if you have neither.
It would likely be defacto required, just line SSN is today. Sure you can "opt-out" - but at severe expense to your life.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220127202620/https://www.treas...
The $200 would've helped guarantee food and gas, it wouldn't cover shelter, i was studying in California, the cheapest hotel was $130~ a night. I also tried explaining the situation to the university, but unfortunately you are considered a current student only if you paid your tuition.
There were also programs to help students in crisis (provide them with place to stay, food) but its only available to students who paid the tuition.
PS: As of that situation happening, now i have 6+ accounts with different banks, emergency cash, I do not want it ever happening to me again.
Ha. The same problem applies there too, and burned me at some random gas station in the middle of nowhere on the way to Spokane--8pm at night on a Friday--the bank raised a fraud alert on my credit card. The customer service agent said I had to talk to Fraud, who wasn't in until Monday. There were no hotels (not that I could pay for one of those either), nor any other customers to beg for change. We had to buy gas with change found in the seats and a miraculous disbursement of pity from the attendant. (This was an account with some no-name issuer, possibly Credit One. Only American Express and Capital One have ever been reliable for me in travel.)
Separate incident before that related to poor credit on my part at the time, but the issuer reduced my credit limit on a credit account without my knowledge.
You can't trust anything in the "cloud" will be there when you need it. Rather than hoarding gold or traveling with large amounts of cash (welcome back, literal highway robbery) the meddling to protect themselves needs to stop. Every bank is becoming PayPal.
Please refer to the FAQ from the university i was studying at. #10 to be exact https://sbs.fullerton.edu/about/FAQs.php I was late to pay the tuiton, only because the bank account was suddenly frozen, on a long weekend.
This is the program i was talking about, you can review the eligibility, which states that the student must be currently enrolled. https://www.fullerton.edu/basic-needs/
To me that says "talk to us before the deadline if you've got problems paying". What did they say when you said your bank was having problems?
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.
Basically this happened at the worst possible time and by then the university had had enough of them not paying the bill and not following required policies.
Yeah, I am not believing this story at all.
No University is going to disown you if you are late 1 week. The rest of the story is just as weak.