I saw @ODELL post this on nostr the other day and I kept forgetting to repost it here.
the two largest bitcoin mining pools in the world - Foundry USA and Antpool - require identity verification on all miners that use them
53% of global bitcoin hash rate has been doxxed between these two pools...
https://imgprxy.stacker.news/FszxATSYe5X8K1nNjY31TIJZKtlr9qIrnmrV-HWIcmw/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWdwcm94eS5zbm9ydC5zb2NpYWwvUm9aQnpNbEVUeS05R09kTERrWjZqQjlITTNBbUZIMWNYWWk5Ukh0amxrSS8vYUhSMGNITTZMeTl0TG5CeWFXMWhiQzV1WlhRdlNFbGlRaTV3Ym1j
Given the industrial nature of bitcoin mining I guess we shouldn't be surprised but does anyone know why they KYC to begin with?
Is there a 1099 requirement to the U.S. government? I would think there would be.
Taxes make sense. For some reason I thought it would be self-reported though like if I found gold in my backyard.
Foundry in particular markets itself as " institutional grade" They brag about their KYC policy on their web site!
Foundry advertises KYC as a feature in its front page so clearly this is something the majority of their miners actually want. Most likely this is considered a compliance / risk mitigation feature. Wouldn't be surprised if their financial partners also require it
Regulatory risk makes sense on the part of the pool ... I guess big miners might be afraid of participating in a pool with "bad guys."
Honestly I think this is a really great number, does that mean 47% is non-kyc? Cause that's really good, I mean half the hashrate is a fuckin lot of hashing both absolutely and relative to the other half, and 53-47 ain't that far from 50-50. But as I'm typing this there's prolly also other pools that KYC so it's likely lower than that
I imagine that these miners also take loans to finance their operations. So KYC might make please the investors too.
They really wanna crack down on money laundering