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Comment by jonathansampson | Hacker News Reader

Uphold is working hard to acquire the bitlicense for New York. They shared on Twitter earlier this month that they hope to have this resolved soon.

It's worth noting that Creators also have a referral program whereby $5 in BAT can be earned for each user brought to the Brave platform. brave.com/refer

Thank you for your incredible patience and participation. We hope to see positive developments on the bitlicense front soon. Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you in the interim.

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Thanks for the details jonathan, but the referral program is a bad fit for PortableApps.com. Brave isn't interested in our standardized portable software format (download, install, auto-update, and manage hundreds of real apps in one system using an open format and open source tools). And the browser's 'portable mode' itself isn't actually portable. In fairness, though, all Chrome-ish browsers are broken portably.

Are there any plans to get rid of uphold on the publisher side and allow external wallets? It was a huge turn off to me when I signed up.

We need a regulated entity to do directed (tips, recurring), user-anonymous, off-chain transactions, and to comply with OFAC and other hard regulations. We can't do it ourselves. Wallet is the least of the issue, even if the publisher were willing to take BAT.

Our future phase (Apollo) blockchain work will move more txns on-chain but not solve all regulatory problems. No blockchain can do that unless you are using p2p directly, and then on the current big chains you don't have anonymity or low fees. This may change, we're working on it.

Please do not require people to submit their government ID in order to withdraw their tokens, after you inserted yourself in the donation flow of creators by offering to accept donations on their part from a priviledged UI.

We use platforms which do not ask for our ID, and we would prefer if you would not reduce the probability of Brave users donating to us because they think those BAT tokens will reach us.

Yes, unverified creators are marked as such, but a donation call in the browser UI is a powerful default, more so than the donation service preferred by the creator, which can only be shown as a web page.

> Please do not require people to submit their goverment ID in order to withdraw their tokens

Not verifying ID almost certainly causes a violation of American, British and European anti-money laundering code.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

So blockchain.com is breaking the law by not asking all their customers to upload their government ID and a selfie in order to withdraw the crypto they have received to a private wallet?

Blockchain.com's privacy policy states that, for anti-money laundering purposes, they'll collect:

> Passport and/or national driver’s license or government-issued identification card to verify your identity

(from https://www.blockchain.com/legal/privacy). That's consistent with every other exchange I've used.

Verification is only required to use their exchange, and not for withdrawing to a crypto wallet.

Brave would be able to offer BAT withdrawals for creators in a legally sound way.

https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001835987...

AML laws aren't anywhere near as precise as most people expect. It basicly boils down to "if bad guys use your platform, and you can't trace them, you're gonna go to prison".

10 cents per day money laundering?

We inserted ourselves? Our users are not passive victims, they chose to send tokens, mostly ones they earned from opt-in ads we provide. Your framing is telling. Users who want to get an ad revenue share and donate anonymously do not need to KYC, note well.

If you want to send p2p on a big blockchain, knock yourself out. This will do nothing to support the publishers you can see at batgrowth.com (more all the time, see batgrowth_bot on Twitter). It's a fine thing to do when you are sure of the destination address, and willing to fingerprint yourself on-chain. We never "insert ourselves" there -- no one can. That is the beauty of it. But it doesn't solve all problems.

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