Bitcoin Forum

Have you ever asked yourself what’s the main idea behind cryptography and cryptocurrencies as the end product of it? The last 2 years were marked with dramatic legalization attempts of different cryptocurrencies, and it lead most companies to KYC implementation across the industry.

The primary purpose of cryptography is financial anonymity, and some of the services impose new rules of identity verification, even if your trading volumes are low. Recently we were doing a short industry overview with our team and came to the conclusion that cryptocurrencies are under pressure, EU and US are actively trying to get taxes from every financial operation made with crypto.

We were lucky to get evidence from one of our subscribers, who told that the oldest P2P exchange LocalBitcoins is verifying user profiles if their trading volume has crossed $7,500 mark. Even banks don’t put their attention on such small amounts. Moreover, your account gets suspended, and simply you can’t trade until you send them your documents.

Sure, maybe AML laws made them taking these measures, but regardless of that if you are building this kind of the business, don't you analyze what's going to happen next?

Currently, we are developing our P2P trading platform called RiseX which won’t impose any verification methods or trading limits because it contradicts with cryptography ideology. We want to build a place where people can trade without revealing their personal information.

Our team is just wondering what people think about these measures that most projects take? What future would you prefer in the cryptocurrency industry?

I don't think only anonymity is important for cryptocurrency. The most important for me is that it is decentral money which is "free" and not controlable by the normal bank system. But I think for most cryptoinvestors the most important is to make money with it in any form.

Cryptocurrency initially started with the idea of building a p2p transaction network which will be anonymous and a person will have full control on his own finance. I agree that we have long diverted from this ideology but the question is why?

I strongly believe that we have diverted for good. Since the inception, we have seen cryptos flourishing only because we have adopted the changes. Otherwise cryptos wouldn't have existed till date if we tried to fight for the initial ideology.

Cryptos presented an idea to the mass which is directly opposite to the ideologies of a government run system. To live with the initial idea, we would have needed to create a separate country where the influence of UN or world bank is zero. That certainly sounds like a rebellious idea, isn't it? Otherwise hiding all financial information and achieve supremacy over your own finances is a dangerous idea according to the governments.

So to deal with this situation, we had to take a midway. We are using cryptos but after complying with certain set of rules. Obviously there are countries who are friendly to it and who are completely against it. That's called diversity and we will have to live with it. You and I can't leave our families behind and go to an unknown place to start a guerrilla warfare against the current system. So we gave away some of the privileges and enjoying some it. A peaceful solution!

I don't believe we will regain the initial ideology of cryptos ever unless there is a worldwide nuclear war where majority of the population dies or the world economy is shattered to the ashes without any hope of getting back into track. Lets admit these facts and continue showing your love and affection for cryptos being in the current situation. That's the best we can do!

I think you messed up the two at this point.

The main purpose of BTC if we take Satoshi's paper, for example, is clear, a P2P  system.
Anonymity came later and nowhere as important and later you make it sound like all cryptos are supposed to be used anonymously and all you can do with them is trading.

No, RL usage is what matters and you can't create anything anonymous there.

And if we talk of exchanges, I have dealt with a few before when they didn't require all that KYC, did that make my transactions secret? No, because I had to use my damn bank account to cash out ;D.


So your platform won't involve fiat I guess since at that point all the so-called privacy is over.
And sorry to say it, but trading shitcoins anonymously....not really satoshi's vision I would say.

It depends on people firstly :) That's called diversity if I am correct. As for me financial freedom supported with decentralization is important. Do you wait for majority to get personal financial freedom? Me not, sorry. I will support decentralization and financial freedom. Even alone

but so far we are still not completely free, even fees from some transactions are still dependent on the density of the blockchain network, this will be a problem in the future if indeed Crypto will adopt massively. Because of course to accommodate the increasing number of users and also avoid network problems can not be resolved quickly

your "team" first has to learn the difference between "cryptography" and "cryptocurrency"!
Cryptography is the act of encrypting a message through a wide variety of methods and it has been around for hundreds of years initiating in Middle East and extending to the rest of the world. the methods started with primitive ways such as writing stuff on clay then shattering that "tablet" into pieces and storing them in separate locations in a way that each piece alone is not readable but when they are "re-combined" the message would be revealed.

as for your post, you seem to have confused a bunch of stuff with each other! KYC being implemented by services such as exchanges has nothing to do with "ideology of cryptocurrency" it is implemented because they are using fiat and/or  are scrutinized by the government.
KYC being implemented by some ICO shitcoins has nothing to do with "ideology of cryptocurrency" either, it doesn't even have anything to do with AML laws. it is only a fooling technique used by ICO scammers to fool people into thinking they have a legit project.

I think most of these companies/projects start out with good intentions and once they gather enough users and support, they come under the radar of most government agencies and they are forced to change their policies to keep their doors open.

The only way for these projects to stay with their original goals, is to remain anonymous and also to operate a decentralized service that would be difficult to take down.

Bitcoin is a perfect example of this. <Satoshi was anonymous from the start and the technology is decentralized>  ;)

The only problem of having an anonymous trading platform is that it attracts criminals. The silk road wasn't supposed to be a drugs marketplace but had all the features needed to make it that way

The fundamental values of Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency based on blockchain rely on the principle of decentralization and when it comes to the centralised exchange or company, it faces trouble from governing authorities. I don't see any exchange where it is out from interference of the government of that respective country as far as there is someone running the exchange. One has to follow laws and regulations if he is doing anything but on the other hand, decentralized mechanism prevents third party control and intervention.

whether you ask for any kind of verification or not is irrelevant to this "ideology" that you keep repeating here. and when you speak of a new exchange the only thing that matters is what kind of guarantee you are going to give your users that trust your platform with their money, that you won't get hacked or you won't run away with their money? and since you can't give any kind of meaningful guarantee, then there is no difference between your exchange platform and dozens of others that got hacked or waiting to be hacked!

In my opinion, the decentralized system created during the creation of Bitcoin was a positive idea. However, it is very difficult to accept this with the perspective of the current period. This is something that can be achieved in the future.

Cryptography is the method/technique of sending and receiving secure messages over a medium, and cryptocurrency is essentially currency using cryptography to promote a secure way of sending and receiving money. We can get back on track on being decentralized and not affixed to a centralized system with the rise of atomic swaps and decentralized exchanges, but apparently some governments are not into this idea and are thinking that this is just another way of laundering money and circumventing the laws and regulations existing to prevent such nefarious activities, Also, most of the people are into the 'easy money' scheme and belief, and centralized trading platform provide them just that.

Unfortunately yes, I agree with you. Many people got involved in this industry only because they had a desire to earn money, but they didn't follow the main ideology which crypto-anarchist Tim May tried to spread all around the world. Sure, some of the people started to use this technology to hide their financial operations, but the rest of the users are only trying to make money with cryptocurrencies.

We understand your concerns and from your point of view you are right, we all saw the news about Cryptopia exchange and a dozens of others which got hacked in the past years. In regards to our security that we try to maintain, first of all we do not store hot wallets on our main server and have deployed it separately. Moreover, our separate server communicates with our service via Stellar Blockchain, and on top of that we have restricted any other communication of our server with outer world. Thereby it will be hard to locate it and attack.

Personally speaking, with the development of cyptocurrency, many thing will change or be changed, there will develop plenty of factors that people have never thought about, so ideology of cryptography is. Optimistically, it may upgrade with development.

Why you are so convinced that exchanges must deal with fiat, so they have to implement KYC and AML? Regardless of the fiat usage on the exchange, they can implement that because you can launder money without fiat on a specific exchange using available cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH, XMR and other. Moreover most of the exchanges have USDT which replaces fiat at some point and allows more flexible money laundering, but in the end exchanges will verify and freeze your account if you manage huge amounts of money even without breaking the law.

No, I don't think that financial anonymity is the primary purpose of cryptocurrencies (and still less cryptography)

As Satoshi himself wrote in his whitepaper, Bitcoin is only pseudonymous, so anonymity is definitely not its primary purpose or ultimate goal. If you ask me, I think Bitcoin aims at being a peer-to-peer decentralized currency, i.e. a decentralized, free of third party risks, means of payment (which is what the word currency essentially stands for). Other than that, there is nothing wrong (conceptually) with levying taxes on your income earned through financial operations with crypto (if that was your point)

Hi! Yes, we won't be using fiat on our P2P exchange, moreover, for every coin traded on our platform, we'll implement cryptocurrency mixing, intended to clear tainted coins and obfuscate transaction history.

In regards to Satoshi's vision, I think he wasn't promoting Bitcoin itself, but entirely different paradigm of money, and even if we use altcoins nowadays which offer higher anonymity he's not sad at all ;)

I realize that this is one of the actions to collect user information to be able to verify with the government users who have positive exchanges. They are trying to authenticate with the government that all transactions verified and there are no activities to support unauthorized money laundering.

Etherdelta CEO was subjected to such issue because they were operating illegal exchange and the grounds I remember includes them not asking KYC for users. While we oppose KYC, the resistance might result differently. WE could always find ways to trade without them but since we aim for adoption, pressuring exchanges is their way of imposing the regulations.

I heard about this situation before. They do collect user information for sure because it's a critical problem for governments from the standpoint of financial integrity and security of the country. No banking system wants to use real money that has limited emission, that is why they try to put so much pressure on the exchanges, and can you notice that this happened relatively fast? - In just one year(2018).

We think that many exchanges were forced to share user's personal information with law enforcement of different countries, Moreover, at some point when your platform becomes popular and you have high trading volumes you will have some issues with state structures.

the sad truth is, most people who are in Bitcoin right now don't care about decentralization or anonymity, they just care about making money.

From my perspective, this is a false dichotomy

Obviously, you can find a couple of people on both ends of the scale, i.e. people who are into Bitcoin exclusively because of its decentralized nature and capacity for providing anonymity, though in the latter case there are by far better alternatives while Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto himself, considered Bitcoin only pseudonymous and not truly anonymous

With that said, the majority of people gravitate toward the center of this scale. They like Bitcoin because they are free from third party risks (such as rogue banks and governments constantly stealing the purchasing power of their money), but they are also happy to make a few bucks with Bitcoin whenever an opportunity arises. And there is nothing wrong with that as it is just human nature