[neiman]

I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents.

For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.

So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.

Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.

My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.

At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.

I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".

[tpm]

> I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.

That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.

[splix]

As someone who have been living in a couple of countries under a temporal residence I can say it's not that simple. In many cases the temporal residence is simply not accepted, or not in the list of standard docs, etc. Private companies don't really care about all those non standard cases, and they ask either for a passport of the country or a permanent residence at least.

So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about

[alexey-salmin]

Not OP but in a similar situation. In online banks there's nowhere to upload these temporary certificates, they accept a limited number of options (passeport, residence card etc) and temporary certificate printed on an A4 paper isn't one of them. You can try sending it via email to customer support, I did it with around 8 different banks and Revolut was the only one to reply and open an account for me after the manual review. Another one was PCS that didn't even ask for residence permit but then it went bust, and it took around 6 months to get the money back.

Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.

[egorfine]

I'm in the same position as the GP. Impossible, because EU bureaucracy sometimes yield kafkaesque deadlocks. For example, some EU countries stated that their permits given to ukrainians are to be considered valid past the printed expiration date and thus stopped producing new plastic for them. Now, good luck finding any KYC provider that will accept that. Or any KYC provider that accepts printed Poland's TPS. Or any provider that doesn't chuckle on a set of documents, each of which is from a different country (like me). Etc, etc.

KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.

[neiman]

You get a stamp in the passport that you're waiting for a decision regarding your stay, but it's meaningless to anyone besides the border control people.

[moltar]

Tell it to Portuguese banks. Run around forever.

[soco]

I assume there will never be any implementation side to focus on, if there's no legal side to push for it. Because as we can clearly see around us, the tech boys don't give a zit on your accesses and privacy and rights, so they have to be pushed to care.

[neiman]

There are plenty of civil organizations and hackerspaces in Europe that focus on such things, not to mention academic groups.

[scoofy]

>I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".

You realize that "locks keep honest people honest" is a reason to have locks, right? The point is that honest people will commit tax fraud if we make it easy for them to do.

[neiman]

Yes, you're correct. I used it in the wrong way.

I don't think KYC keeps people honest, I think it's just making the life of honest people uncomfortable.

[etrautmann]

"honest people will commit tax fraud"

wouldn't that make them dishonest by definition?