Just wrote a whole thing and it didn’t save 🤦♂️ let’s try this again.
KYC means “know your customer” and it’s a set of laws where financial services are required to collect a ton of your personal info to provide the service (the way bank or a Bitcoin exchange requires your name/address/social security number/etc.).
It’s “supposed” to help prevent money-laundering and tax evasion, but criminals know how to do their job and they can simply use cash.
Instead, it forces normal citizens to reveal a ton of private info to a centralized service, which can then be hacked or leaked. And, due to the nature of Bitcoin, once the sats are associated with your identity, your spending and saving can be tracked and it’s ultimately a massive privacy violation.
Non-KYC Bitcoin is the opposite. It’s usually acquired peer-to-peer, from another individual. Like Zaps ⚡️
There are also services that facilitate peer-to-peer buying of Bitcoin.
My opinion (and some may disagree) is that it’s perfectly fine to hold and use either/both kyc and non-kyc Bitcoin, *AS LONG AS* you always keep both stacks completely separate. Because as soon as you mix your KYC-free coins with KYC’d coins, then your identity gets linked to all of them.
So having two wallets that never send back-and-forth to one another is key here. And never sending KYC sats from a centralized service into your non-KYC wallet is also important of course.
Happy to answer questions, and I’m sure the #plebchain would be delighted to chime in with resources and newcoiner-friendly advice as well.
Happy stacking 💜
