<story><title>Tell HN: Coinbase now requires physical address of recipient in crypto transfers</title><text>Just got this email from Coinbase, and it seems one by one the promises of crypto of the last several years are evaporating:&lt;p&gt;Starting on June 27, Coinbase will introduce some changes required by local regulations. Specifically, when you send crypto outside of Coinbase, we are required to ask you for the name and physical address of the recipient and the purpose of transfer. In certain cases we may require you to link a Coinbase Wallet to your main Coinbase account in order to send crypto assets off the Coinbase platform. This allows us to verify that you control the Coinbase Wallet that is receiving the crypto assets.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Barrera</author><text>&amp;gt; ... it seems one by one the promises of crypto of the last several years are evaporating ...&lt;p&gt;Hardly. What&amp;#x27;s happening is that a financial institution is being regulated and pro-actively adopting steps to please regulators. And those regulators will never be satisfied.&lt;p&gt;As regulators squeeze harder and harder, it will drive Coinbase under. That is not the disaster that some might think. It&amp;#x27;s a necessary next step for Bitcoin to prove that it can actually deliver on the promise of censorship-resistant money.&lt;p&gt;At the very least what&amp;#x27;s happening with exchanges, regulation, and the over-eager suits at Coinbase demonstrates the need for censorship-resistance in the first place. None of the new steps add anything whatsoever to the experience of the user. It&amp;#x27;s all about other people exercising control over that user&amp;#x27;s money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lkrubner</author><text>You call this &amp;quot;censorship-resistance&amp;quot; but it seems to be &amp;quot;law-resistance.&amp;quot; This is a point that critics of crypto have been making for awhile: crypto&amp;#x27;s only use-case seems to be to avoid the law. At least in the USA, the courts have typically granted wide latitude to technologies that have a mix of both legal and illegal uses, but crypto seems to only have illegal uses, so it looks more and more like one of those technologies where the courts often allow strict regulation or outright bans. Especially in the democratic nations, where the laws have the legitimacy granted by popular representation in the political process, there is no reason to tolerate a technology if that technology exists solely to evade the law -- there must be some clear legal purpose for the technology.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Coinbase now requires physical address of recipient in crypto transfers</title><text>Just got this email from Coinbase, and it seems one by one the promises of crypto of the last several years are evaporating:&lt;p&gt;Starting on June 27, Coinbase will introduce some changes required by local regulations. Specifically, when you send crypto outside of Coinbase, we are required to ask you for the name and physical address of the recipient and the purpose of transfer. In certain cases we may require you to link a Coinbase Wallet to your main Coinbase account in order to send crypto assets off the Coinbase platform. This allows us to verify that you control the Coinbase Wallet that is receiving the crypto assets.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Barrera</author><text>&amp;gt; ... it seems one by one the promises of crypto of the last several years are evaporating ...&lt;p&gt;Hardly. What&amp;#x27;s happening is that a financial institution is being regulated and pro-actively adopting steps to please regulators. And those regulators will never be satisfied.&lt;p&gt;As regulators squeeze harder and harder, it will drive Coinbase under. That is not the disaster that some might think. It&amp;#x27;s a necessary next step for Bitcoin to prove that it can actually deliver on the promise of censorship-resistant money.&lt;p&gt;At the very least what&amp;#x27;s happening with exchanges, regulation, and the over-eager suits at Coinbase demonstrates the need for censorship-resistance in the first place. None of the new steps add anything whatsoever to the experience of the user. It&amp;#x27;s all about other people exercising control over that user&amp;#x27;s money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cal5k</author><text>This is called the &amp;quot;Travel Rule&amp;quot;, and it&amp;#x27;s part of an international effort to regulate crypto transfers analogously to bank transfers. When you send a wire transfer, you include the address of the recipient and your bank includes your address in the transfer.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s technically a FINCEN&amp;#x2F;FINTRAC requirement in the US and Canada, but they imposed the rule before any of the tooling existed... so there&amp;#x27;s a bit of a scramble happening right now to figure out how to comply with the rule. Coinbase put together a consortium with other centralized exchanges in an attempt to create a common standard that should hopefully reduce the manual work required by customers, but this is absolutely not isolated to them.</text></comment>