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Comment by SkyBelow | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm being naïve and idealistic, but I would think an open source project would have a much easier time of navigating this than a private individual. Open source projects are built off of donations of both money and time. As for what is being returned, the project itself existing helps enable many businesses leading to many people becoming rich. As for expenditures, large open source projects are open with how they spend their money, so where the money ends up going is easy to see as well. There is far less ability for something nefarious to be going on for why a person is being paid.

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Large open source projects are set up as legal entities like corporations or foundations.

But a small open source project doesn’t exist in the eyes of the law. In a way it’s the worst of both worlds if you’re doing non-profit-like things such as receiving large donations, but operating as a private person.

Banks want KYC information, even for donations, esp when its in these amounts.

I don't see a problem. Of course banks want KYC, but that doesn't stop you from selling the crypto on e.g. Coinbase (also KYC'ed) and sending to your bank.

If you deposit a quarter million dollars into your bank account out of the blue the bank are absolutely going to ask you where it came from, and "don't worry yourself with that", or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen and a note sent to the relevant authorities.

>or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen

For 99% of banks, you'd be totally wrong about that.

> a note sent to the relevant authorities.

This, of course, means literally nothing. Banks will "send a note" for just about any reason. This results in said authorities drowning under a mountain of millions of pointless suspicious activity reports.

> If you deposit a quarter million dollars into your bank account out of the blue the bank are absolutely going to ask you where it came from,

I've deposited a larger lump sum into a US bank account and was never asked where it came from. I was then able to use that money the same day to pay off a loan.

What they actually tend to do is have someone in management call to congratulate you and invite you to discuss banking products. I know this from personal experience.

In the worst case your funds would be frozen for a couple months then you’d get a letter saying we are closing your account for compliance reasons and attached would be a cashiers check for the balance of your account. Then they’d file a SAR that would get put in a queue behind the millions of others because the government only reads a small fraction of them.

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