Even Bisq has a 0.01
BTC trading limit for unverified accounts, and Binance has withdrawal limits as high as 2
BTC?? What's the point of blocking access to whole countries if they can just transfer it to someone abroad who can withdraw it to a bank account they control?
If you're going to implement AMLs then at least do it properly, false impressions of compliance are worse than no compliance at all.
I wonder what this exchange would have done if the criminals had sent all the coins directly to a mixer or via coinjoin. Would they be trying to sue wallet developers? Or perhaps the bitcoin developers themselves for coming up with coinjoin?
Legally they can't file a lawsuit against a collection of open-source developers if they have a legal complaint with the software they're developing, because an open-source project is not a legal entity. Instead they usually go after major corporate users of said software, like how SCO sued IBM (or was it Novell?) to claim Linux kernel source code as their intellectual property. In this case if they were to initiate such a hare-brained case they'd be going after Blockstream, who sponsored some of the bitcoin devs at the time Coinjoin was made.
This is one of the reasons why privacy and security advocates frequently tell people to take their internet security and privacy seriously.
If you have your identity stolen and used in a money laundering or similar scam, you can end up with a criminal record and serving a punishment for a crime you did not commit. It can take years and tens of thousands of dollars of your own money to get your name cleared, all the time leaving you with a criminal record, unable to get a job, get insurance, and so on. It's difficult enough when the crime is in fiat and you can show account statements and similar which prove you had nothing to do with it. How much harder do you think it will be for bitcoin? How do you prove you do not own a bitcoin address?
Every time you complete KYC anywhere you are taking a risk.
Agreed, KYC is fundamentally broken. If you complete KYC for your bitcoin services you are effectively using a less useful form of payment than credit cards, since those are accepted practically anywhere, whereas Bitcoin isn't. You need to give your documents to every single vendor you want to buy from, versus a centralized bank or payment processor.
AML regulations seem to have been hastily written as soon as regulators noticed that bitcoin was being used for illegal things like Silk Road. They are playing a game of whack-a-mole if they put KYC requirements on the top 50 exchanges but you can just withdraw your BTC to a credit card on Yobit or
.
I've never completed KYC before, and probably never will, because I can't afford to lose my identity. But, I also feel bad for bank account commoners whose bank documents are stolen and used for identity theft but they are not even aware that their identity has been stolen.