Nice article with a high level overview. It puts in words some concepts that have been floating around my mind for a while now.<p>It has many points, but at least for me it specifically ties in to the current conflict of control around the monetary/payments system. The battle of who has control over the flow of payments. This is partly pro-KYCAML vs anti-KYCAML, but also just a problematic lack of a sane permission system.<p>Case in point from a US perspective: Recently having been annoyed with Gmail I decided to go to a paid mail provider and settled on ProtonMail. I wanted to avoid paying with my debit card tied to my bank account. I try to avoid this because I hate hate hate auto debiting with the fire of a thousand suns. Not that I have any particular reason to distrust ProtonMail as a company, but I shouldn't have to trust anybody. It's my money and it should never leave my account absent my explicit approval. Imagine if the OS gave RW access to any process that requested it. And then you try to upgrade the filesystem to have even basic permissions, and the OS says "What's the problem bruh, you don't trust me?"<p>After a few days of researching this in my spare time, one method I tried to purchase from ProtonMail was a brick and mortar purchased Visa gift card. That did not work, I think because they are Europe based. I have had that same problem for instance trying to buy from gog.com in the past. Another method I researched was setting up a crypto wallet (I am a novice here) and purchasing Bitcoin (so a USD -> BC transaction). The Bitcoin payment processors I looked into all required SMS verification, presumably due to KYCAML. Another option which I did not try would be to mine my own Bitcoin. I did not even attempt this because my understanding is that it's no longer cost effective and/or timely on a GPU.<p>So I finally just gave in and used my debit card. It's annoying and sad but I have other things to do than research for hours every day trying to route around the damage of the legal system I live in. It's disappointing to me that US taxpayers pay their taxes to subsidize this nonsense, and that US legislators and courts continue to entrench this system. I don't see it changing anytime soon though.