LakeBTC was started in early 2013 when bitcoin began to gain traction. Initially it was for professional traders and investors only. As lots of users from all over the world flooded in, we realized it is not just another sophisticated trading platform for wall street pros.
I remember there’s a user, who works in another country as a foreign labor, needs to send money to her children back at home. As you can image, she doesn’t earn much while the banks charge hefty fees on a simple wire transfer. Sadly, ripping off the poor is like a crime legalized by the governments.
Another user is still a student, who works as a part time designer/translator from customers from abroad. This freelance job does not generate lots of cash but it helps pay off his college tuition. Still, the current payment and currency exchange solutions available are either too expensive or troublesome. He’s looking for something simple, reliable, cheap, and free of chargebacks.
And there are many users, excluded by the traditional banking systems, who have some money to save and earn the interest, build the credit history, and get the credit line for their cars, homes, college, and small businesses. All of these stories shocked us and made us to review our original business model of LakeBTC. It’s hard to believe that in the United States, there are over 1/3 of the population that’s unbanked or underbanked. That is more than 100 million Americans! In the world there are billions and billions of people without bank accounts.
Some say banking is a privilege. This is not right. Banking service should be available to everybody, just like clean water and fresh air. LakeBTC does not want to become just a firm serving fund managers, rich individuals and professional speculators. LakeBTC wants to become the one who extends the comprehensive banking and financial services to the billions of unbanked people around the world, at very affordable fees or even free in the long run. We have the technology and business model, which generates profits (not by ripping off the poor, unlike the others).
Money should be able to flow freely, from one person to another, from one country to another, from one currency to another. Financial services industry is being over regulated, in many ways and in many countries. Everybody, especially the poor, is paying too much compliance taxes today. Yes, anti-money laundering and anti-terrorisms, investor protection are important, and financial firms should be regulated. But, there are something that the regulators should and can do. For example, different country, different agencies, lawmakers from the same jurisdiction can utilize modern technology to better and more efficiently do their jobs. In the future if cash is killed and all transactions move to blockchain and platforms like LakeBTC, it’s quite easy to detect and trace down illegal activities.
LakeBTC enforces AML and KYC from day one, and the bitcoin technology itself is public and transparent to everybody. We try to follow all applicable laws and regulations because we believe, staying compliant is to the best interest to all our users.
https://www.lakebtc.com/p/9342