New York - North Korea

The more and more I experiment around with different exchanges the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I have been turned down from several non U.S. based "crypto currency" exchanges because I am a U.S. citizen. Now, this little gem below, comes from Terms and Conditions of ShapeShift, which strictly exhanges crypto-tokens for other crypto-tokens never dealing with fiat currency of any type. Why would New York residents be excluded from using this service? Is it because we need to be "protected" from ourselves?

This next gem is from Bitstamp, a Luxembourg based Bitcoin exchange where in order to deposit any fiat currency, you have to go through standard KYC/AML, which to the unbeknownst among us, stands for "Know Your Customer" and "Anti Money Laundering" procedures, roughly translating to something short of having your ass x-ray'ed. Bitstamp is not different from any other exchanges out there, and to be fair, I am sure the exchanges are cool and would love to simply serve their customers as best they can but they have to abide by tons of regulations in order to exist in the first place.

I am still waiting for Commerzbank to confirm if this is actually true. Who would have known!? In the mean time I wanted to check if I will have more luck withdrawing Euro to my bank from Kraken exchange. I wanted to do a test run with 10 Euro. The withdrawal request was immediately put On Hold and I am currently waiting for support to answer why they have done so. When I got verified to Tier 3, my daily withdrawal limits were set at 25,000 Euro daily! While I was filling out deposit slip I noticed that the maximum amount I can withdraw is 65 Euro! Second question to Kraken support was, if they could kindly explain how I should be interpreting those limits now and if I am by any chance hallucinating. Still waiting for the answer.

I would advise any of you out there who managed to get verified and have transferred any funds in fiat to try and do a test fiat withdrawal with a small amount just to to see if it is not a trap door / one way hashing function equivalent of your money flow.