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.