What do you consider the true definition of “KYC” as it relates to bitcoin and privacy best practices? I know what it means in terms of the legal / statutory definitions and Wall Street financial regulations, etc. I am more curious what people who are technologically trained would say.
Example: If you have an email address that contains your full legal name, and it’s an email address that you’ve been using for nearly all online activity for 20+ years, and you’re still using that email address to earn sats, for example, within the Bitcoin Magazine or Fountain apps, do you consider these sats “KYC” (ie “traceable” or “compromised”)? Even though these services require nothing more than an email address (ie no Name, Address, Location, etc.)?
I think there are probably a lot of people like me who signed up for some of the popular bitcoin related sites very early on, and began earning sats before we realized what all of the privacy implications were. Separately it seems like it would be pretty tedious to go back and retroactively audit our sats-flow to determine where each of our “KYC” and “Non-KYC” sats reside today, by email address, by wallet address, etc., unless absolutely necessary (which is the point of this post).
Thank you all for any input on this
KYC is of course a spectrum just like privacy. When I say Never KYC I mean don't answer questions or supply information that is unnecessary for the provision of the goods or services. Obviously this doesn't mean you should do illegal stuff. It just means that whomever becomes interested in your history needs to follow legal channels hopefully requiring probable cause in order to track you down.
Privacy is important for defense against tyranny and KYC is a specific denial of privacy and enabler of tyranny.
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Hey there, while you still have the evidence (held in various places) that you earned those sats, you can break the link between those sats and you, making it so when you spend those, less likely they would know who's sats they are using LNproxy. It's like a VPN for Lightning, adding a hop.
Here's a discussion on it: #72589
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Great, thank you for this
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