What KYC is, and why some services require it

KYC stands for Know Your Customer: a service collecting and verifying who you are, usually with a government ID and a photograph, sometimes a proof of address.

It is not something companies do for fun. It is expensive, it loses them customers at signup, and they do it because of what they are regulated as.

Anti-money-laundering law in most countries requires businesses that exchange or transmit money to identify their customers and report certain activity.

A platform that converts crypto to local currency, or operates as a licensed exchange, falls squarely in that category. That is why every large exchange asks.

Upside: a KYC'd service is usually a regulated one, which means supervision, audits and somewhere to complain. Recovery of a locked account is at least possible.

Downside: you have handed a copy of your identity documents to a company whose security you cannot inspect. Document databases get breached, and unlike a password you cannot change your passport number.

Also practical: verification can take days, fail for mundane reasons like a blurred photo, and in some countries is simply unavailable.

Neither answer is strictly safer; they move the risk. KYC trades privacy and a document-breach risk for recourse and oversight. No KYC trades recourse for privacy and speed.

BYCRYPTO does not run identity checks. That is a deliberate design choice and it is genuinely convenient, but it is worth understanding what it means rather than only what it saves: a service without identity checks is not a regulated one, and you are relying on the service itself rather than on a supervisor behind it.

Which is the right trade depends on how much you hold there and what you need it for. The sensible position with any custodial service, checked or not, is to keep a working balance rather than savings.