The best explanation I've heard from folks in the know in cryptoland which is favorable to Tether: massive, massive abuse of OTC desks / other-than-formal currency brokers in China, with a huge amount of yuan being accumulated domestically in return for Tethers.
With the end goal of Tether hopping crypto-friendly rails in the US, allowing a truly massive transfer of wealth out of China without touching Chinese capital controls.
This is the *positive* narrative.
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Me: “Hmm I have to send a package to Ruriko’s mother. I’m sure the delivery firm can do that, but I don’t want to lug it to a convenience store to fill out the form. Do they have a website?”
Kuroneko: “We do! How about you type in the address/etc and we will send someone.”
Me: “So they’ll arrive tomorrow maybe?”
Kuroneko: “Or in two hours, you know, a more reasonable speed.”
Me: “And how much will this cost?”
Kuroneko: “Oh the driver will quote you on the spot, because weight/parcel dependent, but think like $5.”
Me: “And when does it arrive?”
Kuroneko: “Tokyo to anywhere in the country? Tomorrow. What 2 hour window is most convenient to you.”
Me: “Even after living here 15 years this amazes me.”
Kuroneko: “This is literally the only thing we do.”
My colleague @hazelcough was in charge of some pretty major changes to the Stripe Payments API. I really, really love the writeup; it touches on how we matured in our understanding of this problem domain over 10 years.
People have a very positive impression of our level of discernment, but we certainly don't have all the answers and didn't when we started.
There is no single resource explaining the complexity of moving money around; we uncovered it through work over years.
And while Stripe is a company with very global ambitions, our internal understanding of the payments space was very, very influenced by being built primarily in the U.S., where cards are ubiquitous and the primary payments rail startups care about.
SaaS asymptotes are brutal, brutal things, and they sneak up on first-time SaaS owners all the time. You feel like you're doing everything right, the product is getting better, you haven't stopped working... but growth hits a wall.
This happens with mathematical regularity.
"That's a metaphor, right?"
No, I mean there is literally a formula. Tell me your acquisition numbers last month and your churn rate; I'll tell you your revenue when you hit the wall.
This is a great business waiting to be built. The state of the art for it, at places which charge $$$$ for tax preparation, is "Get out your calendar, tell us what days you were in X (perhaps by filling in Excel), and a ludicrously underutilized person will total by hand."
A number of people got in touch with me in the 2013ish era as a businessman with legitimate banking on both sides of the Pacific to help them move money out of Mt. Gox.
Which, as you might expected, I noped right out of.
Proposed transaction would sound like "I'll pay you $120k in JPY, coming from Mt. Gox. You pay me $100k in the US. It's a win win; I avoid Mt. Gox's banking delays and you make money."
I suspect a great deal of peoples' annoyance with KYC isn't anything which is actually *required*, but is hitting poor *implementations* of it, sometimes with no clear path forward, which prevent them from doing the thing they actually want to or have to do.
This is often times because post-opening KYC is generally coming from exception handling in the financial system, and because (for the types of transactions likely to cause that in the lives of "typical people commenting about KYC") it is an edge case and not very designed for.
You often see (or worse, don't see) cracks in the abstractions, too, where you are dealing with someone passing a message from someone passing a message from someone passing a message from the underlying call site which generated the exception.