Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Proposal for some BIP with KYC elements
by
Peter Todd
on 25/04/2015, 08:35:02 UTC
⭐ Merited by ABCbits (1)
There is no reason to store these kind of private encrypted data on the blockchain. The blockchain should be used for storing

  • Public data, or
  • Private data but timestamping is needed

For the case you suggest, users and merchants should digitally sign those receipts and KYC data (with mutually agreed timestamp if needed) and keep it by themselves.

I've actually had this discussion with regulatory/banking types... There's pressure to have the data on the blockchain itself precisely because it forces it to be "sufficiently" public for governments to be happy - many of them want it to be fundamentally impossible to use the blockchain without giving up that information. First step is to be able to know for sure if the data exists.

Obviously pay-to-contract-hash techniques are the sane way to do this stuff... but we don't necessarily have the same goals as regulators do. One of the hard political challenges for people enganging with regulators is convincing them that privacy matters, and any KYC system has to be an add-on, not an inherent part of the system.