That’s not why KYC / AML weere brought in though.

It was brought in the vast majority of countries post 9/11 to stop terrorism although it hasn’t stopped any terrorists just given Gov more control.

In Australia the agency responsible for creating all the KYC / AML requirements is called AUSTRAC . They have a budget of $170,000,000. Last year all of the surveillance they were doing on every single consumer transaction resulted in 160 arrests. Things like tax schemes etc.

Costing the tax payer more than $1million to per person.

On top of that if you include the additional cost all the businesses need to incur to meet the KYC requirements plus the time of everyone filling in all these forms, that is estimated to be around $3,000,000,000 societal cost being the cost per caught criminal to $18.75 million.

All the while we are having record number of breaking and stabbings. Where violent criminals are much, much cheaper to arrest. Purely from a cost benefit it does not make sense to impose these and cost society 18 million per white collar criminal.

It also creates huge risk for data leaks. Because there is so much sensitive data capture there is going to be more data leaks, resulting in increase of scams and identify theft.

Then, there is also the fact that we are building the tools for tyranny and only need wrong government in place to really take advantage of the huge controls they have.

Just think of it this way. Digital payments only became prevalent in early 2000s before that it was all cash. No one was worried about kyc then 9/11 happened and now the government needs to know how much I spent on bread or sent to my brother.

Consumer protections is a whole different game, but you don’t need to kyc everyone’s money (which they have done) in order to achieve them. We didn’t with cash.