What on earth would lead you to conclude that unbanked households don’t use online services? I can’t imagine any possible set of starting assumptions that would lead there, short of fairly cartoonish assumptions about the demographics the FDIC pointed out at that link.
Even within the unbanked households, the FDIC link points out that 1/3 use online non-bank services instead. And independently of that, it makes sense that even cash households might interface with online commercial activity: pick up gig work through DoorDash or UberEats or whatever; get paid out through a neighborhood informal-cash-service operator (multiservicio, hawala, guy who informally cashes out undocumented drivers). Or through opening a Venmo or CashApp account instead of a bank account.
That leads to a slightly stronger form of the claim: that those 5.6 million are likely to have undergone KYC/AML through other, non-bank financial providers…
But even then, why should a bank account be connected to whether or not you’re an adult in society’s eyes?
> and those 5.6 million probably aren't accessing sites that require age verification.
Why would you presume that?
> Not every solution needs to work for 100% of people.
A solution that censors large amounts of speech and culture from millions of people is clearly either insufficient or, if it is deemed sufficient, authoritarian.
My attempt at _a_ solution isn't _THE_ solution; but it seems like there's legitimately something around leveraging existing KYC infra that could get a solid 98 out of 100 - and can realistically be implemented in a realistic timeframe.
If I'm AYLO and have been cut off from 1/3 of the U.S. for the last 18 months, I'm contacting every lawyer, cryptographer, and engineer I can get my hands on to try and get _anything_ out of this concept or ones like it.
oncallthrow|6 months ago
alwa|6 months ago
Even within the unbanked households, the FDIC link points out that 1/3 use online non-bank services instead. And independently of that, it makes sense that even cash households might interface with online commercial activity: pick up gig work through DoorDash or UberEats or whatever; get paid out through a neighborhood informal-cash-service operator (multiservicio, hawala, guy who informally cashes out undocumented drivers). Or through opening a Venmo or CashApp account instead of a bank account.
That leads to a slightly stronger form of the claim: that those 5.6 million are likely to have undergone KYC/AML through other, non-bank financial providers…
But even then, why should a bank account be connected to whether or not you’re an adult in society’s eyes?
blahaj|6 months ago
Why would you presume that?
> Not every solution needs to work for 100% of people.
A solution that censors large amounts of speech and culture from millions of people is clearly either insufficient or, if it is deemed sufficient, authoritarian.
const_cast|6 months ago
These people are already disenfranchised and mistreated by society. Let us not marginalize them more.
djoldman|6 months ago
jwally|6 months ago
szszrk|6 months ago
1. 7 million (2020) has no proper ID [0].
2. 120 million struggle with reading [1], and you can assume at least 7 million realistically can't read.
3. Banks already do identity verification across the world, even on behalf of the governments themselves.
I see many challenges in what OP is proposing, but banking adoption across population is not one of them.
[0] https://www.voteriders.org/voter-id-research/
[1] https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
jwally|6 months ago
My attempt at _a_ solution isn't _THE_ solution; but it seems like there's legitimately something around leveraging existing KYC infra that could get a solid 98 out of 100 - and can realistically be implemented in a realistic timeframe.
If I'm AYLO and have been cut off from 1/3 of the U.S. for the last 18 months, I'm contacting every lawyer, cryptographer, and engineer I can get my hands on to try and get _anything_ out of this concept or ones like it.