RE: BlockTrades users must now create an account to trade with us
This is grave news.
People who saw benefits of having an account with BlockTrades, already have one, therefore there is no point in discussing those.
There are however people who used your services because it was possible without leaving definite trace and with pretty much no limits.
You can't leak what you don't know. Now with mandatory account all the problems show up:
- what information are you going to collect
- how are you going to protect it against unauthorized access
- what laws apply to you
- which (governmental or other) organizations will have access to that information
- is it possible to challenge request for such information in court and if so, are you willing to actually do that
- are you going to let the target know about their information being accessed etc.
It is not that I don't want to give you my identity. You know who I am, so it wouldn't affect me, but other customers are not in the same situation.
On top of above mentioned problems new daily limit is atrocious, especially considering the limit so far was the size of your hot wallets. I haven't used them in a while (because for the last year I was using BlockTrades for most of my trades) so maybe something changed but back in the day Binance had no deposit nor trading limit and 2BTC daily withdrawal limit for unverified accounts. If that still holds the new $1750 USD barrier looks bleak in comparison.
Damn, it was such a good exchange...
The answers to your questions are mostly publicly available on fincen.gov web site (with the exception of our own security procedures), but I'll summarize relevant answers as it might take you some time to read there.
Regarding the limits, I believe they are necessary to meet FINCEN reporting requirements outlined above if the business is a crypto exchange. I suppose it's quite possible that many crytpo exchanges outside the US are ignoring these requirements, since their principals probably reside in other countries. But generally, when you file a Currency Transaction Report, you are expected to provide basic identity information, not just an email. And 2 BTC is more than 10K USD now.
As to remaining question about the security of customer information, we are maintaining it at a highly privileged level (same as we have always maintained customer information). The data is stored on the same servers where we keep our crypto wallets and it is only accessed by 3 highly trusted and trained personnel here.
bring unregulated decentralized platforms......regulated and centralized authority deciding the rules...
anti-cryptocurrency philosophy in my opinion