There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.

instead I’m here boning up on the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

I mean, Ferengistan is Europe and in wider sense the West in Farsi, so - pretty logical.

(Which is why I don’t subscribe to the theory that Ferengi are an antisemitic trope. They are a subversive futurist trope, “seeing ourselves through the eyes of others the same way we often see them”.)

Everyone likes to see themselves as the heroes of some universe.

It’s also true for some Soviet science fiction, like things by Strugatsky brothers communicate that deep painful wish for “us” to be that society of scientific workers and doctors, and the barbaric and lost people they visit and help to be “them”, but that’s not how the world is. Even the “approved” Ivan Yefremov with his “Bull’s Hour” shows a space colony which is supposedly a remnant of the “capitalist and imperialist” world, yet surprisingly reminisces USSR, while that team of heroes from heaven that comes trying to fix them doesn’t seem like anything from USSR.