FUD BUSTER - “ You were KYC’d at birth."

Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Bitcoin consumes more energy than entire countries. It's a way to both hide dirty money and destroy the environment at the same time. Bitcoin just seems like a scam.

So I forgot the whole business. It's anti-social, stupid. We've got debit cards, isn't like we don't have a pay on stock. Feeling Bitcoin and we'll shut the fuck up about Bitcoin, your money-hungry opportunist.

Stop that. This is the FUD buster line. Please leave your name, your FUD, and your response after the beep. Max, the murder here. I want to talk today about some of this FUD surrounding this KYC, non-KYC thing.

You see, you were KYC-ed at birth and there's no point in not doing KYC because then you can't pay a mortgage with it because you just reveal your identity and then what's the point? I think this misunderstanding stems from seemingly this belief that not doing KYC

means that someone is like searching out some sort of shadow life to be completely anonymous forever, lurking around the corner, never quite being revealed. But that's not actually the case.

This whole KYC thing is just about power. The state wants to control Bitcoin. This thing that is ostensibly outside of its control. So how can it try to control this uncontrollable protocol?

Well, it does that by trying to exercise power over the users of that protocol. Knowledge is power. So the more knowledge that the state can obtain about the users of this uncontrollable protocol, the more the state can then weaponize its monopoly on violence

and coerce those users that it has gained this power over into doing only what they're allowed to do rather than being able to do the things that "they" don't want you to do. So not doing KYC then, not handing over your name, date of birth, social security number, address, acute little selfie, maybe even a fun little video.

By not handing that over in order to obtain what is, let's not forget, a subversive technology, then you maintain this knowledge and thus the power and you have it in your back pocket. It's about maintaining the power balance.

Bitcoin is supposed to be about taking the power away from the state, away from the central bankers, and putting it back into the hands of the individual. One of the key ways that it does this is through pseudonymity.

When you do KYC and you tie your identity to that amount of Bitcoin, you have given away that protection that was afforded to you by the Bitcoin protocol. You've given away so much of your power.

Now that doesn't mean that you'll never ever reveal your identity to anyone. Let's say down the road, you do want to pay a mortgage with your non KYC Bitcoin. How would you do it? Well, you would pay it.

But the difference is you're now choosing to reveal to this particular vendor the information about yourself and about this certain amount of Bitcoin. The choice is not being taken away from you as it is by these KYC exchanges.

So in the same way that privacy is not actually the search for anonymity, but privacy is simply having the ability to selectively reveal to the world what you want to reveal when you want to reveal it.

Not doing KYC is about choosing when and whom you reveal information about yourself and your Bitcoin holdings to. So it's about making sure that balance of power is always firmly on your side, on the side of the individual and not on the side of the state and the central bankers.

And as a bonus, in just in case these states that always seem to trend toward tyranny, in case they get there a little quicker than what we expect, this would protect you from any sort of overreaching confiscation, blacklisting, all these sorts of things.

It keeps you off of the low-hanging fruit list. And it keeps again the power on your side. That's it. FUDBUSTER. Thanks for listening, and if you can think of someone who is throwing this exact FUD at you, maybe over the dinner table, maybe when Bitcoin prices down over Christmas, and they throw it in your fucking face,

you can send them this file. If you're listening to this and you can think of some more FUD that needs destroying, email me or write to me on Twitter, you can suggest someone you think would be great for battling the FUD as well.

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