I’m a pretty poor correspondent, it seems, on this issue. But I’m tired of this sitting in my ToDo box.
Yeah, guess main thing I’m saying is Uphold just gets this information from you when you create your account. Once you do it, they almost never ask for it again.
I didn’t have enough transactions to discover whether this is true. I only had probably three withdrawals or so before I was hit with the “liveness” check. Perhaps my understanding was wrong, but I thought that had become something I had to do every time. But I still think you’re apologizing too much for them. I’ll return to this below.
This is newer policy to a point. I’m not sure how old you are or if you ever used checks, but I’m 37 years old. Back when I was 16 and trained to be a cashier, we accepted checks as payments. We always had to ask to see ID for anyone trying to use a credit card or check. We also couldn’t accept a credit card if it wasn’t signed.
Let’s just say I’ve been writing checks well longer than you’ve been alive. But I was never in the habit of handing a check to someone in person, say at the grocery store. Lots of people did, and I’m sure they were required to show ID, but I didn’t.
When I talk about not showing ID with checks, I’m talking about through the mail. I’ve sent untold numbers of checks through the mail, stacks and stacks of them. And to this day it’s quite common for your bank to send them on your behalf when you use online checking.
And we all do this with our credit cards as well. We all routinely buy things online with nothing like a liveness check. And it’s also common for one to direct one institution to send money to another, like when you use, say, Apple Savings to withdraw money from your checking.
The point I’m trying to make is that pretty much everyone I know has a fairly complicated financial life - checking, savings, brokerage, multiple banks, credit cards, friend exchanges, many vendors, online, offline - you name it. I know I do. And I’d never yet had an app require me to turn my phone camera on to pay a friend for pizza. It’s just a step in the wrong direction.
I don’t mean to say that there aren’t real differences between crypto and checks, credit cards, banks, vendors, cash settlements, etc., etc. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t good reasons for things to be substantively different for Uphold and crypto. But whatever those reasons might be, the end result is that my personal experience was uniquely bad when compared with every other financial transaction in my life, perhaps with the exception of redeeming a CD or getting a mortgage. Those are pretty awful.
Brave is in the midst of trying to build out Rewards to allow for on chain payments that wouldn’t require any custodial partner. They’d be able to send the BAT and all directly to you.
I hope so. And I hope they’re able to get my attention to make this clear to me once it begins. If things get better, I’ll be happy to turn my ads back on in Brave, but right now, it would just be charity.
