Know Your Customer (KYC) — a compliance process required by Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws, involving getting a unique government-issued identification docume

Know Your Customer (KYC) — a compliance process required by Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws, involving getting a unique government-issued identification document or other similar "identity proof" from your customers, before allowing them to use your service. Any service that takes deposits or processes payments in certain countries is required to follow those countries' KYC/AML regulations. The actual AML laws are mostly about noticing when a given person has processed $10k or more through your service in a single day. But note that that's "person", not "account." You have to de-anonymize your accounts, in order to associate them with people, in order to obey the law. The conventional KYC "compliance" measures — gathering ID documents et al — are actually not part of the law itself, but rather are industry best-practices for following the AML laws. The KYC process gives service-providers the information needed to restrict each person to having only a single account; and therefore allow service-providers to treat each account as a person under the letter of the AML laws.