Is this how freedom ends in the UK?
The UK’s latest “crypto AML rules” slash ownership disclosures from 25% to 10%, pulling more people into disclosure regimes and expanding banking surveillance.
These measures are framed as fighting crime. But similar rules in tradfi have existed for years and haven’t stopped fraud or money laundering.
What they do create are honeypots of personal data, risks for law-abiding people, and deeper state oversight. This is about normalising authoritarian tools, not AML or safety.
Decades of KYC and financial surveillance show how control creeps in rule by rule. That same authoritarian logic already governs speech, from the Online Safety Bill to Graham Linehan’s Heathrow detention over tweets.
And now digital IDs are back on the table, linking finance, identity and turning everyday access into a system of control.
Add in programmable money and street surveillance, and you have a panopticon, a 1984 scenario darker than Orwell imagined.
https://99bitcoins.com/news/bitcoin-btc/new-uk-crypto-aml-rules-target-ownership-banking-and-trusts/
The UK has offically sleepwalked into authoritarianism.
That's not what the article is about, it says crypto companies must disclose changes in their ownership structure above 10%.
You are right that non of these control measures have anything to do with aml, it is so they can enforce taxes more easily. Same with ebay, Etsy, wix etc all having to spy on customers and report sales to government
Yes, the threshold is for firms’ ownership/control changes above 10%. But the wider issue remains: lowering the bar drags more firms and their shareholders into disclosure regimes …framed as AML, but in reality just expanding surveillance.
Quite a large context drop to say 'people' when the proposed laws are for firms and those particular laws do not increase disclosure for customers which is already at 100% if they use a kycd service
You’re right, my wording could have been clearer. But lowering the bar still pulls the people behind those firms into wider disclosure via AML reporting. The wider concern remains the same, and the detail is in the provided documents.
