Escaping the Tyranny of Place, History Lessons About Technical Disruption for the Internet Age and the Staggering Ineffectiveness of AML-KYC

Podcast Ep. 64 with Olivier Roland

Olivier is an entrepreneur, investor, and independent author. He wrote “The Way of the Intelligent Rebel” and blogs at Disruptive Horizons.

The blog is about the disruption of the nation states by the internet and globalization and how to transform from a mono country to a netizen without borders.

This episode is full of practical insights into how to start unbundling your life and join the movement towards the decentralization of governance.

Olivier's journey started with Tim Ferriss' book "The 4-Hour Work Week", as a way to unbundle his life through entrepreneurship and digital nomadism.

As a digital nomad, Olivier recommends the "Six Flag Theory" to become a mobile and sovereign individual protected from the overreach of extractive states.

Olivier is also a history buff and started a 2-part series with ten principles from history about the disruption of large institutions by new technology.

Here are the three key ones we talk about:

• 1st principle: The power of governments is based on the immobility of their subjects.

• 3rd principle: When a cheap, hard-to-censor communications technology develops, the authorities in power try to control it and institute mechanisms to tell "good believers" what is true and what is not.

• 10th principle: new factors, especially technological ones, can disrupt existing institutions, even those that seem immortal or irreplaceable, and replace them with new ones. 

We also talk about AML-KYC financial regulations: they started with a noble goal, but have become an inefficient bureaucratic nightmare.

The full article is worth reading - it’s incredibly detailed and well-written.

AML-KYC is a very stranded technology-style regulatory topic. The first ever Stranded Technologies Episode with Sean Pawley covered the story of creating a bank under flexible Prospera regulations. What I found staggering is that AML-KYC is untouchable, Sean would be able to operate without it - it’s so ubiquitous that it would be impossible to interoperate with the rest of the world without it.

Like so often, the problem is not the idea behind it. It’s in most cases a good idea to know your customer and the majority of businesses would probably do it anyway.

The problem is how it’s done: it’s provided through a monopoly.

Under a monopoly, things get inefficient really fast. It is estimated that the global compliance cost is $304bn per year but only managed to seize $3bn criminal funds.

The episode is a fundamentally optimistic one: the disruption of nation states by the internet and cryptocurrencies is unstoppable, the cat is out of the bag.