Hacker News

points by simonra 12 hours ago | 0 comments

Banks in the developed parts of the world only really need to know the national identifier of their customer to report their assets for tax purposes, and be capable of verifying passports/government id tied to the identifier when they show up physically to claim what's theirs. Asking about anything else is only needed because the Usians bullied everyone into wasting humanities limited resources on it because they're administratively stuck several centuries behind when it comes to governance.

[–] LoganDark 7 hours ago

See, I don't believe that IDs are only used for verifying that someone in-person is the owner of an online account, because if that were the case, I wouldn't need an ID for banks that don't have physical locations. Rather it seems ID verification is used to correlate a legal person's accounts with each other, and make it more difficult to perform confidence scams. (Confidence scams typically include things like using a different identity to disconnect your actions, and their consequences, from your own legal identity.)