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> I don't know what KYC is

KYC = Know Your Customer

> but I'm not US based

When sufficiently large sums of money are involved, it's hard to conduct legal business and not play by US rules. Swiss banks discovered this, at considerable expense to themselves and their customers. Cryptocurrency exchanges are going through the same discovery process right now, in both the legal and the philosophical sense.

> > Instantly liquid programmable assets

The unfortunate property of the liquidity of cryptocurrency assets is that they have a tendency to get siphoned away or evaporating in ways not anticipated by their owner.

> > Financial censorship resistant

> Is this a feature? Don't we as a society want a way to control e.g. drug lords and tax evaders moving their money around?

That's precisely one of the questions at stake here. Some folks appear to pine for the benevolent overlordship of the likes of, say, Ross Ulbricht.

>I don't know what KYC is but I'm not US based. Sounds like some fee that's peculiar to US banking environment (which I have heard is extraordinarily bureaucratic).

KYC stands for Know Your Customer, basically anti-money laundering regulations. Banks need to have a decent grasp on whether or not the money they're working with was "earned" legitimately.

>Is this a feature? Don't we as a society want a way to control e.g. drug lords and tax evaders moving their money around?

See above :)

Disclaimer: I think cryptocurrencies are a spillover from a couple decades of inflationary monetary policy from the fed causing people to seek yield in more and more esoteric forms. I also think they're stupid.

KYC = know your customer = anti money-laundering. Yes, it is bureacratic, and it can be a pain for regular, non-money-laundering customers. With crypto, you can instantly create an account offline and trade around the globe.

As far as programmable banking, I meant it in the sense that people can create "bank apps", aka contracts. It goes way beyond simple routing of funds, since it's turing complete.

Financial censorship is a feature, since the finance industry does exclude people and countries. For example, in the US you need to have a $1M net worth or something to be an "accredited investor" which grants you certain privileges. Ethereum doesn't make such distinctions - you can interact with and create any financial product/contract (depending on its rules). Brokerages also regularly halt trading, and make you answer a bunch of questions before trading certain financial products. There are 2 sides to the financial censorship coin so I'm not going to pretend this is always a great feature.

I'm focusing on finance because so far it is the main use case for ethereum. There are a lot of decentralized financial products and derivates now, that even trade in a "USD"-backed crypto (USDC, DAI). Honestly, it all works pretty well, but its not without its downsides and pitfalls.

One of my favorite things about the whole thing is that it gets rid of ACCOUNT CREATION. It's so nice to visit a website/app and just approve it with your wallet. It's the ultimate SSO - there is no email verification crap, its all so instant and frictionless to play with financial products that would otherwise be a bureacratic maze. It's even easier than logging into hacker news.

Anti-money laundering regulations are a good thing to me. I want this, even though it means I had to get a passport made for my 4-year old son so that the bank could see he actually existed and his account total of $50 was not being used by some ukrainian oligarch.

I also think it's ok to put in some speed bumps and force a tiny bit of due diligence before allowing people to gamble away their savings. I'm assuming there is a different risk profile to trading Kazakstani stocks as compared to German stocks, and I think people should be made aware of what they are getting into.

Wirecard and Volkswagen are German companies, you can buy their stock easily.