Nice to see all of the old-timers!
Holding people's
BTC hostage until they produced an identity theft kit and supplied it to Bitstamp as they did back in the day was a true dick move. Other entities who were compelled to migrate to more 'approved' KYC methods did not do this. I swore that I would avoid their service for that reason and to this day I have.
In Bitstamp's defense, I noted that it's now half a decade on and I have not see a huge number of claims of flat out theft. Seems like they have been trying successfully to operate a legitimate business and be contemplative in this challenging space. It also seems that when they did eventually get hacked they made their customers whole and ate the losses, though I would also note that it would be easy to engineer psy-op along these lines for marketing reasons. e.g., to 'build credibility'.
At the end of the day, there are simply not a lot of good options for cashing out of BTC when one needs fiat in the real world. Bitstamp was simply the 'least bad' option that I could see for my friend's situation, so that is what we tried first.
Here's a typical thread which describes my friends experience almost exactly:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitstamp/comments/9syucs/bitstamp_poor_service_and_money_never_arrived/---
I'll throw out another thought in Bitstamp's defense: If Bitstamp was to be transparent with respect to their sub-contractors (payment processors) in order to have credibility with their own user-base, it could be a big no-no in bank-land and they would have trouble getting anyone in that space to do business with them again.
Seems that the 'standard' in the fiat banking industry is to be secretive, deceptive, and dishonest and rely on the fact that most plebs cannot muster the financial resources to defend their own interests. The banksters seem to be the primary forces behind installing governments in our so-called 'democracies' and the governments they install operate the courts systems. It's no wonder that the banks have the upper hand, and they don't hesitate to screw other entities when it serves their interest.
Again, I don't doubt at all that the 'processors' (e.g., banks) are screwing with and screwing Bitstamp and that that is motivating force behind the problems that my friend is experiencing at the moment. If I were a bankster I would try to arrange so that the only entities who could competitively operate were ones which were under U.S. jurisdiction. Could well be that Bitstamp finds themselves a target of such an effort.
An interesting game play here is that in order to angle for control over the crypto-currrency space, the tactic is to make fiat currency and the fiat banking systems not work for certain people. It will be interesting to see if the tactic ends up demonstrating even more that there is a need for crypto. I personally have always had Bitcoin work in a reliable and expedient manner. Dealing with fiat is ALWAYS a giant hassle and often doesn't work at all. And I'm not even a criminal or even a tax cheat!