You're right, it doesn't meaningfully impact regular people. But as a crypto investor, vmception's real beef is that anti-money laundering regulations make it harder for criminals to transact in crypto and therefore harder for him to make money.

In France, you have to fill a full A4 form if you want to move more than 3000€. At least I do, but some others surely dont.

It just wastes your time when you signed up at your bank, at your brokerage firm. You may have forgot that at one point you did a tedious process. But maybe all your banking was created recently and you have a nice streamlined online signup process that worked perfectly for you, more on that later.

It will waste your time when you want to do anything like borrow especially for a mortgage, or anything slightly more complex when you get some bright idea like trying to transfer the stock shares directly instead of selling them first. It will waste your time when want to invest in other things like a private equity fund or directly into someone else's company. It will waste your time if you try to create more advanced retirement accounts and then invest with those.

It will definitely waste your time when the fintech middleware company that made signing up to a bank easier with some super streamlined online identity verification software doesn't recognize you. "I swear I really didn't live on any of those street addresses, wtf this was supposed to take 5 seconds".

So, it's wasted double-digit minutes of my life, at most. It added one single step to the many tedious steps of onboarding.

> It will waste your time when you want to do anything like borrow especially for a mortgage,

The Augean amount of random bullshit you have to shovel when buying a home absolutely dwarfs the KYC compliance component of it. It's not a meaningful impediment to owning property.

> trying to transfer the stock shares directly instead of selling them first.

Transfer from where to where? One brokerage to another? What gain is there for me in doing that? Could you quantify roughly how much money I'm leaving on the table from not doing this? Where would this money come from?

> It will waste your time when want to invest in other things like a private equity fund or directly into someone else's company.

If I wanted to do that (Can't say that I do), and even if AML/KYC weren't a concern, accredited investor requirements (which I meet, FYI) would require me to jump through the exact same hoops to do that.

You're not making a convincing case for how AML/KYC is materially harming me. It's just one of a million procedural checkboxes that my counterparties ask me to meet, in order to lend me money, or take my money.

I've wasted an order of magnitude more of my life on hold with Comcast, than I have on this. If there's a vast conspiracy to keep me poor, AML/KYC is doing a piss-poor job of it.

> You're not making a convincing case for how AML/KYC is materially harming me.

I'm not the person you originally replied to. Their speculation is conflating a couple things.

You're not diversifying your risks by putting all your money in the US.

Try doing something abroad, like starting a business elsewhere, opening a bank account, investing abroad, and tell us how it goes.