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KYC is often a requirement for travelers because it provides a credible threat of financial or legal consequences for the traveler if they misbehave or commit fraud.
If a guest trashes their hotel room, abuses staff, runs up an unpaid bill, uses stolen credit card info, etc, KYC data gives the hotel (or its insurance company) a way to recoup their losses by pursuing damages in court from the abusive guest.
In a way, honest guests are forced into surrendering their identity as a way of putting up collateral to ensure they behave well during their stay. Hotels can't safely offer their services without such collateral.
Perhaps instead of their identity, customers who prefer to retain their privacy could offer, y'know, actual collateral, vis-a-vis bitcoin.
The traveler deposits some agreed quantity of bitcoin in a 2-of-3 multisig contract. The collateral is released back to the customer (minus the hotel fees) if the hotel and traveler both agree. But if the two aren't in agreement, they bring in a mutually trusted auditor who can attest to the correct outcome and divide up the collateral accordingly.
One might envision this as a service hired in advance by both guest and hotel. This service acts as an escrow who attests to either "the stay went smoothly" or "dang that guy behaved terribly", or anywhere in between, according to the findings of their investigator. Since the majority of hotel stays go smoothly, this service could make big bucks. In fact, this service could be generalized to work in almost any industry that requires KYC data as collateral.
thanks for sharing your thoughts. Ideally we do not want to place any third party between the existing two. My aim was to ideally utilize the "smartness" of bitcoin for it. I can see it as a preset of transactions that need to be set:
So the customer that want to book:
  • send request
  • define date range
  • define # or people
  • define whatever else is needed
The service provider in the other side:
  • review request
  • approve/reject
  • send more transactions request (invoices?) to the customer
Finally customer sign (cryptographically) and all contracts waiting in the mempool to be confirmed or disregarded. Again, I do not have the tech knowledge to define if it could be doable or not. Ideally I trust bitcoin... will fix this too!
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