ANNA: The Future for Unregulated Bitcoin Exchanges
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2020
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To KYC or not to KYC? In this episode, CoinDesk’s Anna Baydakova talks to Hodl Hodl and Bisq, two non-custodial, no-KYC bitcoin exchanges.
This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Crypto.com.
One year ago, the Financial Action Task Force, the global anti-money laundering watchdog, ruled that crypto transactions data should be controllable, and ever since the question has been not if you KYC your users but how you do it.
However, not all bitcoiners have surrendered to this norm. Hodl Hodl and Bisq don’t provide centralized custody and don’t check user’s identity. They also don’t employ the blockchain tracing tools to block the “tainted” coins (blacklisted as coming from illicit activities), which became a must for major exchanges these days.
What comes with this? A chance to buy and sell bitcoin without revealing your identity, as well as much more responsibility over how you buy and store your crypto. Max Keidun, the CEO of Hodl Hodl, and Steve Jain, contributor to Bisq, dig into why in the times of crypto-compliance people still might need (or maybe just lawfully want) to keep their bitcoin deals to themselves.
See also: P2P Exchange Hodl Hodl Takes First Step in Bringing Private Bitcoin Trades to BlueWallet Users
There are more questions to arise from such an old-school-cypherpunk situation: how can you make sure you don’t get scammed at these p2p platforms? What do you do if you buy “tainted” coins blacklisted by the FATF-abiding exchanges and vendors?
Max and Steve share their takes on this, and the main explanation is probably: “everything has a price.” Including freedom from surveillance and data leaks.
We also touch the matter of decentralization that is important to both Hodl Hodl and Bisq. Hodl Hodl is planning to open-source itself, so that everyone can clone and run their own p2p bitcoin exchange in case the regulators go after Keidun and his team. And Bisq has gone full decentralized last year when it turned all its decision making over to a DAO.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If the value to being in this regulated environment is worth it to you, then you've got to pay the price and play by their rules. |
| 0:11.0 | But if you instead, if you want just total freedom, and that's why you're in Bitcoin, then that's how you've got to play. |
| 0:18.0 | I mean, it's just you've got to pick the route you want to go. |
| 0:20.0 | Practically speaking, you can exchange it, right's just you've got to pick the route you want to go. |
| 0:25.7 | Practically speaking, you can exchange it, right? So you could use BISC to exchange it. So BISC also trades liquid Bitcoin. You could just swap in and out to basically new Bitcoin and maybe that |
| 0:31.0 | Bitcoin is not tainted. |
| 0:33.2 | Today's episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com. |
| 0:43.4 | I'm CoinDazc reporter, Anna Baidakova, and today I have guests that don't often appear in the news, |
| 0:45.7 | Bisk and Hodel Hodel exchanges. |
| 0:50.9 | They normally don't announce new partnerships or investment rounds every once in them, and this is because I believe they are quite rare animals in our crypto jungle. |
| 0:56.1 | These are peer-to-peer non-custodial non-KYC Bitcoin exchanges. And these species seem close to |
| 1:03.2 | extinct in the crypto industry of today because we're all about KYC and AML and the travel rule |
| 1:10.0 | and the fat and so on. But these guys |
| 1:12.5 | have quite a unique, and I would say quite a stubborn vision of all this, and we're going to talk |
| 1:17.4 | about it today. So welcome Steve Jane of Bisk and Max K. Dunn of Hodel Hodel. Thank you for |
| 1:25.1 | joining us, guys. Great having you today. Thank you. Likewise. Max is the CEO of Hodel Hodel. Thank you for joining us, guys. Great having you today. Thank you. Likewise. |
| 1:29.2 | Max is the CEO of Hodel Hodel, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace, and the organizer of the |
| 1:35.6 | Baltic HoneyBadger Conference. Quite a cool, hardcore Bitcoin a conference, by the way, which used to |
| 1:41.0 | happen every year in Riga before the pandemic, and maybe you want to tell us a bit more about the plans for this year, |
| 1:48.0 | a bit later Max, and Steve as a contributor to BISC, |
| 1:51.8 | a peer-to-peer exchange that is so decentralized, |
| 1:55.1 | you should run its code on your own computer to do trades. |
... |
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