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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Privacy
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The problem is that even when businesses aren't legally required to store this data, they continue to hoard it anyway.There is a huge difference between KYC for a financial system and data hoarding by a merchant. I completely agree that KYC is a legal necessity for payment systems. When you buy something, your bank already knows who you are, and the payment gateway (like Stripe) verifies the transaction to prevent fraud.But my main question is: Why does the merchant itself need to pull and store your email, phone number, billing address, or even your name in their local database?The payment provider handles the regulatory compliance, but the merchant doesn't need to know my identity to sell me a product or service. This is exactly where UYC (Unknow Your Customer) comes in. We need an architecture where the merchant only receives a "Success" token from Stripe, leaving the merchant completely blind to the user's private data. This prevents every random website we visit from becoming a potential point of data leak.
If the merchant is hoarding the data, they want to do it. If they want to do it, why would they use your framework?
Also, merchants need your name and address to ship the product to you...
Well all they would really need is a one time code that you provide them that you’ve pre registered your address with the shipping carrier.
Would 100% prefer a shipping carrier who supported “oh address is 17bkHdb74nKl? Send it to 123 main st, city, state, etc”
100% agreed on the first part though. Perhaps if the shipping carriers all worked together (ha!) on a common system like this they could do it.
I've had the same though re. shipping addresses, but I don't think it scales well. You'd need every postie to have an online device that allows them to link QR code/uuid code to the real address, and delivery just gets a lot harder.
In Australia, AusPost allows you to generate a "virtual" PO box, which is a lot easier to deal with, but you have to go to the post office to pickup.
Or maybe just a machine at the shipping carrier or post office that slaps a label on the package? Vendor still wouldn't get access to the info, since label is applied after the carrier gets the package. Then the delivery person wouldn't have to faff around with a code.
Ofc, the carrier would have to be somehow prevented from selling the link from 17bkHdb74nKl to 123 Main Street. That may have to be solved legally, since they have a financial incentive to sell the link.
Provided the problems could be ironed out, I like the 1 time code idea. I like it a lot. It cuts a lot of the commercial surveilence ecosystem off at the knees.
Yeah, there would be a lot of potential for leaks, but if they are one-time-codes that wouldn't be too bad.
Not a computer guy by any measure, but engineering a method to carry out banking and other financial operations on a zero-trust system might go a long way.
Welcome to bitcoin / etherium / etc.
I don’t know too much about out the culture and application level but some of the theory.
Bitcoin can transfer currency with ~zero knowledge (at least from one side) and Etherium can implement smart contracts.
I was under the impression only Monero was anonymous, Bitcoin definitely keeps all traceability in the ledger. That along with kyc means your wallet is tied to you. Any transfer to cold wallets as well.
Unless you mine yourself. Then truly zero knowledge. But yes if you try to buy bitcoin via a bank thing then it will be an issue.
Even bitcoin that you mine in its entirety yourself is traced to the cold wallet you mined it into. You then need to maintain a disconnect between your identity and your cold wallet. All coin going from your cold to hot wallet is on the ledger.
The only way to keep the entire transaction cold is to just divide your coin yourself and give the hash on paper.
Then the recipient can cash the hash, so to speak. Idk if it has to be verified on the network though. If so, the trace is re-established.
Maybe someone else that knows how it works better will come in and call me ignorant and spit some facts.
Note: I’m not suggesting that these are good solutions to the problem, only that they were engineered to solve this type of problem.