Also, a decent proportion of crypto-millionaires came by their riches in... not entirely above-board ways (in particular, securities fraud; all those pump and dump scamcoins are paying off for _someone_), and may be reluctant to involve the authorities. And the crypto industry as a whole is unusually comfortable with extortion; hacked crypto companies paying a kind of bounty to hackers to get the rest of the funds back is a common thing.

This is the crypto industry, who make the discrepancy between Theranos' claims and practice look conservative.

> Coinbase employs a range of technical and organizational measures to defeat efforts to intercept, surveil, or otherwise access without authorization data in transit. For instance, Coinbase encrypts all confidential data transfers to prevent interception or tampering of that data by unauthorized third parties.

Coinbase does business in the EU and thus, already has to comply with the GDPR. Moreover, the US also requires safeguards for sensitive customer information by financial services companies.

... and save the data in US cloud where everybody can access it.

It is really funny how FAANG can get away with data colkection in spite of GDPR.

That's not how capitalism works. /s

Coinbase is the entity that set up this dangerous system.

Coinbase did it because it was cheap for them, not because they were being trustworthy custodians of information that put their customers at risk.

Sure, yes, obviously every company's employees and contractors are vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. That's why a trustworthy, competent custodian would establish systems and controls to prevent bribed and blackmailed insiders from mass-exfiltrating information that could get their customers killed.

The fact that other companies manage to be trustworthy, competent custodians while Coinbase doesn't is not the fault of KYC.

Crypto? It's wild, and people think it's wild.

Also, people do point guns in people’s faces and force them to pay them via Venmo or Cashapp. Google ‘Venmo robbery’ or ‘cashapp robbery’ for plenty of examples. Pointing a gun in someone’s face for $4M in crypto is a lot more lucrative.

The calls they flag as potential spam and telemarketers has been 100% accurate in my experience so i wish I could just silence those

Google's call screening feature picks up the phone before it rings and asks the caller why they're calling. If they actually give a good reason, then it shows you the reason as text and you can decide whether to hang up on them or answer. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387

Because people who read the message and think it's professionally written despite the spelling errors have a large overlap with people who will fall for the scam, at least far enough that money is transferred.

I guess I can walk downtown to CB HQ, but something tells me I won't get past the front desk.

I don't think commodity, forex or stock trading is built into any bank interface but I don't have enough money to know for sure.

So it's different in that way I guess.

More KYC creates more problems while solving some others. Why didn't the same society despite KYC/AML tackle the problem pointed at in a previous comment? "Florida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, drive him to Arizona desert, steal $4M in cryptocurrency"[1] Why is there this crime?

Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.

Let businesses easily accept cryptocurrency (like... regular cash?), without a blade to their throat held by the government, and the need for such centralization points will greatly diminish. People get in trouble by p2p-exchanging money with unknown peers; in some instances this "trouble" has the unit of "years".

It's in nobodies' interest to protect cryptocurrency payments as the alternative, other than the activists, and the big groups jumping in on it for the speculation purposes - something they had refined decades ago. There's CBDC is on the horizon.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999011

So if we want to constrain impact of such attacks, we must make companies keep less data and delete them faster. For example, instead of storing a photo of ID, store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.

This applies not only to cryptocurrency, but to any company like Google, Uber, Amazon etc - if they didn't keep extra data, there would be little value in the leaks.

So the blame is not at cryptocurrency, but on companies not wishing to delete the data and governments demanding them to collect the data not necessary for operation. It's the government and capitalists who create problems out of nowhere.

All of the victims are likely tax payers. Law and order is a fundamental service that a legitimate state must provide to all in its jurisdiction, even those who are only resident non-citizens and those that pay little to no taxes in a progressive tax system.

That's what people say, but it's probably not true given everyone leaves their coins on exchanges.

At the end of the day it'd be hard for me to continue holding that because, on the balance, we expect companies to keep data private and to not enable illegal activity, not gov't to avoid asking companies to do things, lest they screw up.

It’s fascinating that we keep creating new technology and then find out that in practice most of it cannot be trusted. Which means it cannot be used for anything serious.

IT revolution is a bit of a failure

Yet he's a bit urban edgy here, and the staging is like it's an impromptu social media reaction to some online slight. (though reading a script)

You don't want to go full South Park "We're sorry", but I'd feel better about a response in a business dress shirt, out of respect for wronged customers.

With a bit more humbled posture.

IMHO, you're answering to customers you've wronged, and you don't wear a hoodie to church nor court (nor do you play video games during a live TV interview), nor do you assert superiority over the people you let down.

You can convey respect and humility, while also conveying being capable of responsibly resolving the problem.

(Just one person's reaction. I see some things the video did right, IMHO, but some other things jump out as wondering why they did that.)

What about, for example, a higher-tier support person performing QA over someone else’s work? What about DFIR teams doing research on potential abuse? Etc etc.

I'm just very curious to check for myself and my family.

*hah, here's me making it work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMeRFnkHgBc&t=97s

“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, but give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.”

If they didn't say this, there would be pitchforks out about not giving enough information.

This is overlooked most places but if you examine around the time the FATF finally pretty much eliminated bearer bonds, bearer stocks, and large bank notes was exactly the time crypto really took off.

You can receive crypto privately to your own wallet without sharing PII, without any exchange.

> ...bribed AT&T employees at a call center in Bothell, Washington, to "use their network credentials and exceed their authorized access to AT&T's computers to submit large numbers of fraudulent and unauthorized unlock requests on behalf of the conspiracy and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on AT&T's systems," according to the indictment.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/att-employees-bribed-1m-unlo...

alternatively limit the roles and what the offshore people are able to do, but then any escalation means domestic people, which brings us back to "well at that point just use AI to automate easy tasks"

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/call-centers-and-bank-br... "Call centers and bank branches are major fraud liabilities"

https://www.bai.org/banking-strategies/beating-crooks-at-cal... "Aite Group’s findings that 61 percent of fraud can be traced back to the [call] center are equally concerning, as is its prediction that contact center fraud loss will double by 2020."

I bought a house here after a long time out of country and the first year all I got for mail was scam bullshit. Loads of it.

Just jail them. Make it a felony to release someone's PII without their written consent, and make data brokers illegal to begin with.

> numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit

These are not the main vector of transmission of personal information. Yes, Meta could probably do some graph analysis and infer this, but it's a lot of work, and their data leaks are rare in comparison to all the other companies, financial institutions, and governmental organizations, that freely post residential addresses on the internet and to data brokers for the world to Google.

> companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons

KYC requiring addresses should be banned. Companies should not collect a residential address.