It seems froma banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. This makes sense as it is very hard (though not impossible) to pretend you live at an address that is not directly sympathetic to you for a long period of time.

So here HSBC seem to be saying - if you are working with a charity (ie. have a case worker), and that charity vouches for you, then we've done the dance that makes it less of an issue for the charity to help you with an address. but you still have an address; its just the charities' address.

This is a good solution for homelessness. Its hacky, it will miss people, but it is quick.

I expect the path to getting digital nomads a verifiable address via some kind of service will be a long one; and being able to bank without an address even longer.

> It seems from a banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity.

My Indentity card has chip and pin on it with my biometrix data. Some countries have cryptograpgic signatures in them.

You think addresses are secure? They are not even real. They are not a spesific location like GPS coordinates.

They are any written text that gets mailto you. An address of 'big yellow house' can be valid. The following 'address' was delivered:

“Lives across the road from the Spar, his ma and da used to own it, his mother was Mary and da Joseph, moved to Waterfoot after he got married, plays guitar and used to run discos in the parochial hall and the hotel in the 80s. Friends with the fella who runs the butchers in Waterfoot too.”'

https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico

Postcards with 'England' can get delivered to the right person:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/christmas-card-addr...

For political reasons the U.K. (and US) are opposed to having identity cards so that isn’t really a workable solution. 8 think it’s also inaccurate to say that your address for the purposes of banking is ‘anything one can write on a letter to have the Royal Mail deliver it to you’. For example, you probably can’t give the address of a hotel where you’re staying.

They're also against having a population register.

Denmark has a population register ("CPR") [1], but does not have identity cards. It's required that you update your address in the register if you move house or emigrate.

Everyone also has a NemKonto ("EasyAccount"), which is a nominated bank account linked to the CPR (somehow) to receive payments from public institutions. That should make fraud of this type even more difficult.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister

It's probably more accurate to say that it's any residential address that, in the case of the US, is in the USPS address database. Though there are probably exceptions.

I don't understand the issue considering HMRC has a record of every taxpayer? Are these people who are against ID cards also not paying taxes?

As fun as those ways to address a postcard are, they are not addresses that the bank will accept. The bank checks against a database of valid addresses; this is a common problem for people that have just built a house - most companies used cached databases so refuse to accept your address until it has trickled down.

Firstly, they have no authority to refuse - if I have just moved to a new address, the bank had a legal obligation to deliver my monthly statements, letters, etc. Their database is their problem, I have lived at new addresses and every serious institution has a way to manually enter abtirary address. You might get some nonsence from the customer service person and might have to speak to a manager to get it sorted, but if you show up with contract of purchase for a new house that states your address, they can't turn you away.

I have also been registered with several improtant institutions at an address that does not exist, because the telephone operator made a mistake - and the address was preposterous, they have put me in a house number 15000. So they don't check much.

Thirdly, addresses are not real. They are a myth, like simultanous events in special relativity, they do not exist in the real world but people who never had to deal with them much don't realise it.

What we call an address is a set of instructions to the postman, and if that set of instructions gets the post to your door, it is valid. Anyone paying attentions should have noticed that they often recieve post with slightly different permutations of their address. And ofcourse I have given a few silly examples. But there are genuene addresses that are unkowable. I lived in a building that spaned 3 streets, (one for each side, the last side was a house). It had 2 entances and 2 addresses.

There are addresses that are not a {street}{housenumber}, there are addresses that are a grid and no map software knows how to deal with them

And lastly there are houses that have no 'official' address! A lone hamlet near the coast might have no name at all.

So the only way to determine if an address is real, is to sent a letter, and to see if it arrives.

>A lone hamlet near the coast might have no name at all.

In the US, a lot of addressing was rationalized to support E911 service. So for example, a "camp" (i.e. a cabin without utilities) I would sometimes rent used to just have a name. But at some point it got an address on the dirt road it sits on. They also did things like change a road segment name if there was a gap between it and another segment with the same name.

> It seems froma banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity.

I disagree, an address is trivially falsifiable compared to something like an ID or tax record (both of which the government can actually authenticate, and I'd expect/hope that financial institutions have a way to verify them that way).

The concept of a useless, trivially-falsifiable "proof of address" became a standard in the country so what the bank is doing here is merely covering their ass. As long as the entire country believes that "proof of address" is secure then they're in the clear - whether that stops any financial crime doesn't actually matter, especially when the government would rather focus on internet filters or endless gossiping about lockdown parties.

The bank needs an address because they verify the address themselves. They literally send your card and sensitive info to it.

If you try and register 100s of cards to one address, they would notice. If you try and register to 100s of different addresses you can bet your backside that a majority of the residents would return to sender.

Before your address is verified your account has much more stringent fraud flags.

Plus those accounts are going to be locked rather quick if large amounts start getting wired in.

I imagine accounts setup to help the homeless would make poor money mules.

Sort of the inverse situation making corporate accounts hard to get in Japan. Such an account can receive large volumes of cash without raising red flags.

Unless the rules have been tightened since then, fintechs such as Revolut and Monzo (back when it was a prepaid card) used to open accounts instantly with no KYC with low limits (which they get raised when you pass KYC), so I wonder why they wouldn't just do the same and skip the KYC step altogether.

Is this still happening? I feel all fintechs use KYC now. Even other services, such as Airbnb, oddly have started to use KYC.

Most digital nomads of my acquaintance bank in either their country of origin or in a regional hub. Getting access to an address sufficient to open a bank account is not terrifically difficult for socially established people who e.g. have family members in the middle class, capability to rent an apartment for at least a month and get a lease issued, etc.

There are a lot of people in the community who play a bit fast and loose with taxes but from a banking perspective they’re low risk retail accounts and, even if not in technical compliance for KYC, not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks.

(Personal opinion disclaimer, yadda yadda, I would not identify as a digital nomad but have many acquaintances who do and am intimately personally and professionally acquainted with banking internationally.)

How can you skip (at least parts of) KYC requirements these days?

To me it seems KYC gets ever more pervasive: I had opened a bank account 5 years ago in the EU/UK space and 4 years ago closed it again. Now I opened an account again at the same bank - and the process was significantly more involved, more documentations needed to be provided for the same service, even though I had been their customer before.

The KYC requirement makes me feel uneasy from a privacy point of view: If it would be an eyes-only verification, I would be happy to provide a lot of data to prove I'm not a bad guy. But since the data gets stored and potentially forwarded to third parties, this significantly increases my risk for data and identity theft, as number of increasing data breaches show: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data...

And there is also a long-term risk associated with excessive KYC data hoarding about individuals: The atrocities in Nazi Germany were in part possible because the government gathered data about the Jewish population (e.g. by enacting essentially KYC-like requirements for its citizens; though I guess through this lense the word should be "KYJ") and then subsequently used that data to round them up: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-t...

Also, what do you mean by "not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks"

Have a P.O. Box for correspondence. Or a super low-rent place that you're "domiciled" in.

Of course, it has to be in a tax haven. Otherwise there's no point in being a digital nomad in the first place.

>Have a P.O. Box for correspondence.

In the US, the USPS required you to prove your address before they will rent you a PO Box.

So I know someone who decided to move to the Caribbean, the UK bank stopped them from using internet banking, they could only transact with the bank using the phone. Why is this, well in the UK new legislation appeared in 2000 or 2001 iirc which allowed banks to carry out their own "security" related affairs which includes data sharing under the guise of security. Fraud and financial crimes were handled and investigated by the banks instead of the Police and if the banks felt there was a case only then did it get handed over to the Police for prosecution. Perhaps a bit of Jeremy Bentham philosophy at play but also Maslow's hierarchy of needs considering the wide picture of house prices, home ownership and the wider changes seen in UK society.

Its like GDPR creates the impression you have control over your data when you dont if its labelled as scientific or law enforcement data.

"Maslow's hierarchy of needs considering the wide picture of house prices, home ownership and the wider changes seen in UK society."

What do you mean by that? I cannot immediately see how house prices and home ownership issues drive diminishing banking privacy .

You are more likely to stay out of trouble if you own your house and have a family to support, unlike housing association tenants.

When it used to be the council providing the housing, some tenants learned they could get a new kitchen every two years, so right on the two year point, they simply smashed it up and the council fitted a new one. An example of the tenants gaming the system paid for by taxpayers. Although Margaret Thatcher is despised by many for doing things like selling off council houses to their tenants, it was a clever way to offload costs back onto the tenants as many bought their homes and started to get into "property" ownership.

The Northern Island troubles with the IRA largely died down because they made more money "on paper" by becoming landlords and gave up drug dealing and knee capping. A surgeon I spoke to once said some hospital in Ireland was the best for knee surgery and those skills have been lost because the IRA werent doing knee capping's any more!

So Maslow's hierarchy of needs is based on things like high priority need for food and shelter at the bottom of the pyramid and social media like facebook and instagram at the top to keep the ego happy with loads of bot followers. You see this everywhere now, even here on hacker news with the upvoting downvoting system, but Google's more recent removal of the dislike button is perhaps best known.

Psychological population control without having to fire a bullet or bomb, deploy police and the food regulations helping to manage the hormonal fluctuations to keep people docile. Populations controlled with the push of a button, clever init! LOL

As far as I know there is no legal way to be a digital nomad.

You have to live about 6months in the same country at the very least.

No you don't, where did you get this idea from? If you're referring to the EU tax residency logic, then that's based on where you spend the majority of your time, as well as where you have significant connections. Time alone isn't even the deciding factor. If we ignore the other factors for a moment, six months doesn't have any importance here either. You can live in 12 different countries in a year, a month at each if you'd like, for example. Your tax residency will be based on where you spent the most time between all those and then all the other additional factors.

> Your tax residency will be based on where you spent the most time between all those and then all the other additional factors.

Also false. Depends on the tax laws of the countries, but most likely you wouldn’t be considered tax resident anywhere, absent of having a strong economic interests in one particular country (and tax havens wouldn’t care about this, and the burden of proof would be on the tax authority).

I wouldn't bet on "most likely you wouldn’t be considered tax resident anywhere" - first, you have a default tax residency at your country of origin and the local law is likely to say that you lose it only if you can prove another tax residency.

Second, countries are likely to err on the side of caution which benefits them, so if you have unusual arrangements, then it's quite plausible that you are a tax resident of multiple countries and owe taxes to all of them - many countries have bilateral treaties to avoid dual taxation (which is the default outcome in many cases), so a digital nomad in an unusual situation might owe taxes to two or more countries, but are very unlikely to owe tax to no country.

"the burden of proof would be on the tax authority" - no, definitely not. The tax laws generally assert their claim on all income accrued in a certain country. The abovementioned 'non-dual-taxation' treaties have a process so that in reasonable scenarios the worker only pays tax in their home country, but if they don't apply (for example, because the 'home country' is a tax haven with whom there such a treaty isn't made), they owe tax where they earned the income. The mere fact that you are a tax resident somewhere else does not mean that you're exempt from local taxes, that requires fulfilling the criteria of those dual taxation treaties.

The weak point there is enforcement - there are all kinds of ways how a digital nomad can ensure that they won't be hassled much to collect the taxes they owe and they often can avoid paying them - but legally, they still owe them and are at the mercy of the authorities not finding out or not caring.

This. Tax laws are very complicated and the 6 months rule is more a rule of thumb than a "hard" rule. In practice, the tax authorities have a set of tests they perform, where the time spend in a country is just one item among many - and these rules vary from country to country.

Indeed. Every country is different. Being a "tax non-resident" doesn't necessarily mean you own no taxes either.

In Singapore, tax non-residents simply pay a different rate. To be exempt from income tax entirely, you need to work in Singapore for fewer than 60 days.

https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...

It goes even deeper than that. There’s also the question on where is the money being made.

Say a hypothetical scenario, I’m self-employed contractor working through a corporation in, say, Panama, and I spend some 120 days a year in Singapore.

Would Singapore even subject me to any taxes?

But yes, ultimately one can be a digital nomad, not be a tax resident anywhere, and not be subject to any income or corporate taxes anywhere. You just have to be very particular about the countries you pick.

Yes they would tax you because the work was done in Singapore.

Would they know? Probably not.

But it’s not you earning any money, it’s an entity in Panama.

Just outlining the complexity of this.

You’d still have to pay the corporate tax rate in Panama I assume?

How would you eventually obtain beneficial use of that money? Ie how and when would it reach your personal bank account? If it won’t, how do you plan to use the money for your own gain? I assume (haven’t done any research) that Panama wouldn’t let you treat things like paying for Netflix, movie tickets, supermarket shops, clothes shops, etc as business expenses?

At some point you’d need to transfer it from Panama to yourself and at that point it would be taxable (capital gains or income tax depending on how you transfer). If you time things right you could be resident in a country without income tax eg UAE. But you would have still paid Panama corporation tax I believe.

Panama doesn’t tax income on foreign gains, so the corpo tax there would be 0%.

That’s not how Singapore defines “Singapore earned income”.

They define it by “where the work was completed” not “where income come from” or “country where you were hired”.

Many countries do it that way.

Edit: I misread. Well if your Corp doesn’t pay you I see the point, but you’re also the sole owner?

That list of countries is usually pretty thin if you also remove countries which forbid you of working while on a tourist visa.

Most countries actually don’t care about you working on a tourist visa, as long as it’s incidental to the travel and the work is online.

The US is the exception here, not the norm.

> The US is the exception here, not the norm.

That is incorrect. This is actually the norm in most countries in the world.

> Most countries actually don’t care about you working on a tourist visa, as long as it’s incidental to the travel

But it's not

> and the work is online.

The work being online just makes it better hidden and thus a more difficult fraud to detect but it has no incidence on the legality of the work.

This comes up periodically.

Generally speaking, events, meetings, etc. are fine in many countries with just a basic visitor's visa. (US, it needs to be a B-1 Business visa.)

However, as you point out, remote online work is hard to police. That said, you shouldn't say that remote work is the reason for your visit. And you should be somewhat discrete--e.g. not renting a co-working space.