So I don't know why more people don't scream about this but KYC does not prevent crime.
I'm gonna lay out the numbers here because people need to see this. The cost of pretending it works is measured in actual human lives now.
There was a peer reviewed study by researcher Ronald Pol where he found that AML regulations have less than a 0.1% impact on criminal finances. You read that correctly. Less than 0.1%. That means it catches basically nothing. What a joke.
But how much does this cost? The financial industry spends over $200 billion a year on KYC/AML compliance. Europol itself says they confiscate less than 2% in the EU, and in the USA it's even worse, its less than 0.2%.
That means the cost of compliance is over 100x what they recover.
You know what does happen through all of this compliance?
The biggest money laundering operations in human history.
So what do the numbers show for the fully KYC compliant banks?
Danske Bank: $230 billion laundered
HSBC: billions for the Sinaloa cartel
Wachovia: $378 billion in cartel wire transfers
HSBC was laundering money for one of the most violent drug cartels on earth. They got hit with a $1.9 billion fine. Nobody went to jail, then according to the ICIJ investigation they kept moving money even after the fine.
That's not a system that prevents crime. That enables it.
At the same time, the system generates 4.6 million suspicious activity reports in the US alone. 95% of them are false positives. Millions of people's accounts flagged, frozen, and their lives disrupted. For what? To catch 0.1%. But it's not just about the inconvenience of having your account frozen. It's your life on the line. KYC links your identity to your money. Every exchange that collects your passport, your address, your biometrics and all that data sits in a database waiting to be breached.
Coinbase in 2025 employees were BRIBED to steal data. "We're sorry." 70,000 users. Government IDs, SSN, bank details, transaction history, addresses. Yet people still willingly turn this information over because they believe they have to.
And we learned that Persona, a KYC provider used by Kraken and many others, has code that pipes your passport data directly to FinCEN tagged with intelligence program codenames.
Furthermore, while all this happens, 1.7 billion people still don't have access to a bank account. The World Bank says 75% of unbanked people are locked out because of costs and requirements. 100 million in Africa without IDs at all. KYC makes financial access impossible for them.
So help me understand. A system that catches less than 0.1% of criminal activity. Costs 100x more than it recovers. Enables the largest laundering operations in history. Creates target lists that get people kidnapped and mutilated. Yet we're told it's protecting us.
Jameson Lopp tracks physical bitcoin attacks. Wrench attacks up 169% in 2025, and France is a hotbed of activity these days. These people aren't being targeted because of Bitcoin. They're being targeted because their identity was linked to their holdings.
That is KYC.
I know I scream this every day and the people who follow me are probably tired of hearing me talk about it. But I don't know how to say it louder. We need your voice as well.
KYC is not a safety measure. KYC is surveillance infrastructure marketed as consumer protection.
If you actually care about safety, you should care about people being able to transact without painting a target on themselves.
Peer to peer. No KYC. That's not radical it's the only thing that makes sense.
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Replies (29)
AML /KYC are just like gun laws.
They only affect the law abiding allowing the government to spy on benign people
“It’s for the children “
View quoted note →
it's wild
material part of reason why dow is over 50k!! are illicit funds
that fact is retarded
KYC AML is retarded
tiny fines vs locking up devs is retarded
Thanks, that's some hard facts.
KYC is criminal and useless
View quoted note →
The fact that there's been 0 arrests in the worldwide #EpsteinIndustrialComplex is proof that KYC is a PsyOp 👁️
1. KYC is illicit activity
2. KYC is a contradiction of economic fundamentals—money exists exactly because of the reason that you don’t have to know your customer (h/t @Giacomo Zucco)
View quoted note →
Criminals will always find a way, let's not make it easier on them
KYC is an attempt to maintain surveillance and control. It's a part of the modern slave enforcement system.
Steak n Shake received some sats from me the other day, they were KYC for me but they're KYC free for them. Once Bitcoin starts seriously being used as the digital cash it was designed to be, it will naturally shake off the shackles of the KYC cartel.
KYC is theft 🗽
Preach


What most fail to realize is that "money laundering" as a crime, the reason that KYC regulations exist, only became a crime less than 50 yes ago. Before that, throughout ALL of recorded human history, non-KYC transactions were the only thing anyone had ever known and experienced.
Financial Privacy By Default was the standard everywhere and every when until recently. Crimininalization of this turns the victim into the criminal, as KYC itself IS a crime against our human rights.
KYC has become an unquestioned, universal, encroachment on individual's personal safety and property rights. Civil disobedience at scale is the only way to fight these Naked Emperors, by living on personal and professional Satoshi Standards. Leaving Caesor's debt note slave tokens behind for the debt slaves to trade among themselves.
you’ll have to be retarded to believe it is about preventing crime, it is about control
always about control
You're not the only screamer. I've been screaming at the sheep about the evils of KYC for 10 years. They are too subservient to take a stand. The only way they will is if it feels socially safe to do so.
Yeah man, KYC simply creates lists of lucrative targets for a little recreational BnE 😄
I don't do it if I can avoid it in any way.
Kill Your Customer
(It's not an exaggeration)
Hmmm weird take imo. The whole idea of KYC is to prevent financial crime as you say.
How would they give a number on what’s prevented if it’s actually been prevented and never happened? What are these 0.2% or 2% numbers indicating?
Not advocating for kyc compliance but this post doesnt seem very clear
KYC IS a crime against the privacy and rights of everyone. It treats everyone as a suspect and someone to be controlled.
“KYC is not a safety measure. KYC is surveillance infrastructure marketed as consumer protection. “
View quoted note →
KYC was never about crime prevention. Nothing the government does is about crime prevention. Why would they want to make it harder for themselves to steal our money?
If government was interested in preventing crime they'd secure their borders, build more jails, and properly enforce the laws already in place instead of releasing repeat offenders back on the streets.
New laws only ever make it more difficult, and expensive, for law-abiding citizens. Criminals are already breaking the law, its kind of their defining feature, so what do they care about new ones?
In countries where they've introduced gun controls and buy back schemes, you think the crims and gangs handed their guns in?
And why is surveillance bad? I've nothing to hide, so why should I worry?
Well, more Jews got killed in the Netherlands than France when the Nazis took over, and thats because the Dutch kept better records so the Nazis coukd see where all the Jews lived and rounded them up.
In France today addresses of Bitcoin owners were stolen by someone in the tax office and sold to criminals, who are now invading homes and demanding all the Bitcoin.
Government records will always be used for evil at some point.
Real
People have been so brainwashed into thinking we need institutions for money, while in fact money originated organically between people and worked fine far before it got hijacked by said institutions.
We need to take it back ourselves and it is as simple as accepting bitcoin. If we all agreed bitcoin is now the money we use, we have taken control out of the hands of institutions and back into no control. Money controls itself so it can be used by all people on equal terms. Bad people will do bad things regardless of control over certain aspects of life.
Money laundering only exists because we have let the control and greed of institutions raise taxes and inflation to a point where people no longer want to participate in a system that is supposed to benefit everybody. Most of the money gathered by taxes and inflation never solve the problems they are supposed to fix, or improve the quality of lives for people who have a hard time, they are lost in an endless loop of evergrowing bureaucracy.
There's "not a system that prevents crime."
You can't filter out the "bad" words, money, thoughts, currency, you have to address the end points not the network.
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That’s bullshit it works just fine
If AML regulations have less than a 0.1% impact on criminal finances, how do 99.9% of the criminals either a) avoid performing KYC or b) avoid getting caught after they have undergone KYC (despite 4.6 million suspicious activity reports)?
How are 99.9% either getting around KYC or avoiding getting caught after completing KYC? Illegal or not, how they are so successful at avoiding fiat KYC or its implications? Their methods should become general knowledge.
In bitcoin, KYC countermeasures like P2P, CoinJoin, PayJoin, Stonewall, Lightning, and more are well known BTC countermeasures. What are the most successful fiat countermeasures the 99.9% are doing?
Using the fiat banking system… I laid it out right there in the post.
Check it out.
Dánské Bank
HSbC
Wachovia
The list goes on and on.
KYC doesn’t prevent crime it literally helps facilitate it
Is it that easy? Simply …
- select one of those three banks
- perform KYC with the bank you selected
- then freely conduct as much illicit fiat activity as you want without consequence because those banks don’t follow AML rules
Is bank selection all that it takes for 99.9% of fiat criminal to circumvent AML? Sounds too simple to be true.
Basically, the process of shedding KYC for fiat transactions within those banks must be a very well known process in order for 99.9% of all criminal financial activity to avoid capture, fines, or prosecution.
We well understand the tools and process of shedding KYC in Bitcoin, but have very little understanding of how those three banks do it.
Do you know how? Is it common knowledge? LLMs don’t appear to know or are configured to avoid revealing the details of how (unlike the level of details they share about how CoinJoin works).