Investigate Haveno's compliance status
erciccione opened this issue · comments
Haveno will not have custody of people's funds, so we should be fairly safe from regulations from that point of view, but regulations in crypto are continuously changing and we need to make sure Haveno's structure won't create legal problems to its users and maintainers.
It's important to make sure that Haveno stays compliant. We already had some (encouraging) first opinions, but we should have more talks with compliance expert and make them analyse Haveno and its structure, so that we can make changes and improvements if/where necessary.
Possible next steps:
- Talk with people in
#monero-policy, asking for pointers and suggestions. - Contact compliance experts and analyse Haveno and the best ways to make sure it's compliant now and (as much as possible) in the future. Would be probably a good idea to hire somebody for the job. In that case we need a cost estimate.
- Follow regional-specific regulations, which could get harsher in the US, but not in other countries and adapt accordingly.
Ideas and opinions, especially from people interested in compliance, are welcome.
I probably don't have any useful knowledge to contribute, but I think this is a good push and I'm going to follow this thread.
In the end the thing needs to be bulletproof (which includes censorship resistance) to offer any value beyond Binance & co., but a rational person—all other things equal—will always prefer to have an understanding of the risks involved.
With that understanding, risks can be managed properly were the benefit of the mitigations outweighs their cost.
Should the other side decide to end their collaborative attitude, Satoshi can still click the fork button.
The new proposed rules for europe (to be confirmed by the European parlament): https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/53105/st14067-en21.pdf. The summary on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/r218s7/the_most_important_piece_of_regulation_on/
https://www.elliptic.co/resources/defi-risk-regulation-and-the-rise-of-decrime
This has some interesting (and quite depressing) perspectives on how the whole compliance space is going to evolve.
Can enter fake info to download. (Email is not verified)
Here is another report that beaks down the recent FATF guidance: https://www.elliptic.co/resources/fatf-virtual-asset-guidance-what-you-need-to-know (again, a non-working fake email is fine)
There is more interesting stuff here: https://www.elliptic.co/resources
In general, I think it's worth subscribing to the email newsletters of the crypto analytics companies (Chainalysis, Elliptic, TRM, Crystal Blockchain, ...):
- https://blog.chainalysis.com/subscribe
- https://info.elliptic.co/reg-affairs-subscribe-elliptic
- https://www.trmlabs.com/trm-insights (form at bottom of site)
- https://crystalblockchain.com/news-and-resources/
Some of them also have repos on GitHub with interesting things in it ;-) ... e.g., https://github.com/trisacrypto/
People seem to have understood that our interest in investigating the legal status of Haveno comes from the desire of becoming regulation compliant. Our intent is to make sure there is nothing in the trade protocol which could make us subject to regulations. Would be irresponsible and dangerous for both users and operators to launch something like Haveno without making this investigation first.
Our mistake was to give for assumed people would understand we have no interest in Haveno being regulation compliant, but also no interest in going to prison because something we oversaw in the protocol makes us subject of regulations. Since this is being misunderstood for us wanting to comply with regulation (something that would defeat the entire point of Haveno), we are closing this issue. This analysis will be made privately if needed, so that people don't get triggered for no reason.
EDIT: I understand that part of the confusion is caused by the phrasing "It's important to make sure that Haveno stays compliant.". This was a wrong choice of word from my side, it should have been "It's important to make sure that Haveno doesn't need to be compliant".