A great success for the idea that your BTC is a store of value not dependent on traditional financial infrastructure - now it takes the a whole morning and cooperation of 3 banks for you to get at your money.
That is circular. BTC will succeed as an investment because it will supplant other systems for banking. BTC will supplant other systems for banking because it succeeds as an investment.
This is an improvement in my opinion. Normally banks only need a small % of the loan in deposits (see fractional-reserve banking), with BTC we see a bank asking you to have more than 3 times the amount of your loan in collateral.
What's the result of this? For the loaner and borrower, less loans and more careful allocation of resources. For society as a whole, a smaller but more robust banking system not dependent on bogus money.
The whole point of Bitcoin was to form an alternative to banks so that they don’t become all powerful. If banks become better actors as a result, that’s good for Bitcoin.
Banks are an excellent piece of infrastructure, as it stands. If you don't need to use Bitcoin, or you actually care about what happens to your money, just use a bank.
You raise some great points. I would love to see an banking insider document regarding a true assessment of how they could compete with bitcoin. Or in other words, what is bitcoin missing that banks account for in overhead.
I want bitcoin to succeed as much as the next but I think a lot of people are naive and convinced its ready just because they can transfer btc from one party to another.
I just so wish I didn't need a bank at all. I hate them and their 'policies', I don't trust them at all. They monitor my data and have their own goals that overrule my own. But I can't live without one in today's world.
Bitcoin was the proposal to become independent from banks. Everyone could be their own bank.
But then the speculators twisted the original intentions to safeguard their investments. And it basically became the banking system rebuilt in bitcoin. Like the exchanges instead of banks (the EU even has a proposal to make it illegal to keep money on private wallets), the KYC stuff so it's no longer possible to just create an account and work with it. I don't support bitcoin anymore, the idea was independence from big money but they simply took it over.
This sounds very encouraging to me. A number of panelists have talked about how banks aren't allowing btc businesses to setup up basic checking accounts and how this needs to be fixed if the US isn't going to be left behind.
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