KYC is necessary because you do not want for money laundering to be easy. Nor sanctions avoiding, nor terrorist sponsoring.

Why should our rights be restricted when law enforcement is impotent?

The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.

Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.

I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?

It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.

The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.

Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?

cash indeed

when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism

In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that — but does do a lot to enable mass surveillance and oppression.

Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.