Have you met Larry?
excerpted from xapo.com:
Lawrence H. Summers was the Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, and continues to be one of the leading economic and policy thinkers of our time. “Until now whenever we’ve needed to transfer money we’ve had to rely on a third party, whether it be a bank, a clearing house or a payment network. Bitcoin offers, for the first time, a method for transferring value and making payments from anywhere to anywhere, in real-time, without any intermediary. This could mean we soon see many billions of people sending bitcoin everyday as easily as they currently send a text message.”
So if you aren't aware, Mr. Summers has been a certified scumbag since the late eighties and early nineties, bringing us such thoughtful lobbying efforts as "repealing the Glass-Steagall act" which opened the floodgates for wild speculation on Wall Street and indirectly facilitated the financial crisis of 2008 (and beyond).
So imagine my surprise when I go to XAPO's About page, and see this man's face listed as the first "Advisor" in their "advisor panel".
For those who are not aware of what XAPO is, it is a web based wallet service that offers a linked Debit card, one of the first companies to successfully pull this concept off. The reason I looked into it was because several of the faucet sites I visited as a crypto-noob supported direct payments with XAPO.
The irony is, XAPO steals any micro-payments heading into your wallet that are not transferred via Direct Payment.
When I lost a week's worth of faucet payout, for no apparent reason, I immediately started to dig deeper into it. Well, following blockchain and other such "free wallet" sites XAPO began passing on all miner fees to their users, which was a bit disappointing, but not objectively unacceptable.
Well at this point I decided to get my ~$150 worth of BTC out of there into a wallet I have full control over, when SURPRISE, under the guise of "Know Your Client" compliance, XAPO blocked my transaction demanding a wide array of PERSONAL INFORMATION including social security and "the source" of your funds in your XAPO wallet (presumably for tax purposes)!
This presents a troubling scenario. To setup your account and begin depositing BTC, no such questions are asked of you. In fact, its very hyped around the "Free" phrasing. The reality however, is that if you do not have a social security number or cannot give your personal details for whatever reason, then any funds you deposit into your XAPO account, will basically be stuck.
Now, all XAPO would have to do to correct this is be upfront about the info they collect before you open your wallet, but instead they encourage you to put value in and then demand to see your papers when you attempt to pull it out (central bank style).
Be careful out there guys! Remember hardware wallets and cold wallets like JAXX are your best bet for secure storage! Good luck!
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