Identities ≠ intent: KYCs don't stop crime

Knowing your customers doesn't stop crime, it just turns people's data into products.

In addition to this, KYCs help the government make money.

This happens through;

–taxation
–money paid in fines
–asset seizures

Certainly, when it comes to money paid in fines and assets seizures, one could argue that “he who commits the crime, must pay the fine” but when we take a step back and really look at how the system is engineered, we can see many cases that shows that fines are really just a cost of doing business and do not serve as a deterrent.

KYCs seek to solve something only intent analysis can.

You want to know a person's intent, not what they look like or where they are from.

Of a surety, knowing the latter could help in some cases but it would remain a case of generalization based on past personal group data rather than individual intent data.

The key to fighting crime might quite simply begin with eliminating KYC. People already beat this with fake or stolen IDs, so if that wasn't the needed piece to stop crime, it would make crime much more difficult or expensive.

Think about it.

If a system isn't set up to want to know you, but simply to predict or in cases of post-action, determine if you've done something wrong, this creates an extra layer of difficulty in crime execution as criminals will have to trick the system from understanding their intent.

Surely, this sounds like deeper surveillance in itself, but think about it. Why should you care if the goal isn't about revealing and storing your personal data?

If we are dealing with blockchain-based systems, data needed for intent analysis is pretty much already public, so even if they became monetized, it won't still mean much.

By focusing on intent, we eliminate the incentives associated with businesses knowing their customers. Selling consumer data has always been a big revenue practice for many businesses.

Additionally, we can eliminate the broader appeal associated with crime, on the governance level, because if the beneficiary from crime fines isn't a centralized body, there's a much better chance of setting penalties that truly serve as a deterrent or at least, in the case of financial crimes, ensures that affected persons are top beneficiaries.

Intents analysis contributes to building anonymous reputation scores for network participations, ensuring that people are judged by actions, not basic personal data that can be used against them.