Today Binance officially shuts its doors to American citizens... or so they say.
How does that even make sense? They are providing a service that doesn't require KYC. What's going to stop me from logging in to a VPN hosted in Switzerland? Nothing.
You can withdraw 2 BTC a day without any regulation whatsoever on Binance. That's good enough for what? 99.9% of the population?
This reminds me of back in the day when I kept getting in trouble for pirating HBO shows. My ISP wants my business but HBO is putting legal pressure on them to react. Comcast didn't care, they just pretended to care to get HBO lawyers off their backs. You can always count on Megacorps to do the bare minimum to ensure the highest profit margins.
I ended up getting 5 strikes on my account. 3 strikes and you're out. But wait, did we forget to tell you that strikes disappear after 6 months? lol. A number is chosen and only the top 0.01% worst offenders are going to be punished. If that.
I haven't even received an email from Binance saying they are going to limit my account to withdraws only. Are they expecting everyone to keep up on random crypto news? I get the feeling that the only people who are going to be affected are the ones that did KYC in the first place.
This is all part of the dance that corporations play with regulators to make it look like they are in compliance when there are loopholes everywhere. I guess perception is reality. If people think they can't use Binance semi-anonymously then most of them won't even try.
Certainly, I may be way off base here.
We'll just have to see how it all plays out.
Updates to follow.