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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  796 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I think we oughtta talk about Razzlekhan.

I mean if you look at any historical example you care to name, "revolution in banking" generally doesn't come from the smallfolk. If anything, you can't have a middle class without merchant-brokers and crypto makes merchant-brokerism open to pretty much anybody.

    What incentive would banks have to get behind something that would fundamentally, I hate this word, disrupt their business unless they see long-term financial gains from it?

They make a percentage, same as they ever did. You put your money in the bank because they pay you a percentage to loan it out. Currently? They get to charge a tiny bit more than the government lets them charge, which again, got fucking crazy in October 2019 and we don't talk about it anymore but holy shit y'all. Here's the thing tho - if I can pay you 0.08% with a passbook savings account, but I can make 5% with staked ether, why don't I offer you 4%? Why doesn't the guy down the street offer you 4.1%? Why doesn't Paypal offer you 4.2% to keep you in the ecosystem? Why doesn't a custodial staking service offer you 4.9% because really all you need is a server?

    Also agreeing with am_Unition on trying to grasp the concept of "trustless".

Right now if I write you a check, it's good because there's a bank behind it. The bank is good for it because there's a government behind it. The government is good for it because if the bank don't pay, people go to jail. Graeber pointed out that "government" is a state monopoly on violence, that's it, full stop. We say "the government is allowed to hurt people who break the rules so that the rules don't get broken."

If I send you crypto, it's good because the entire rest of the crypto ecosystem agrees it's good. This happens automagically without any human intervention. The entire exchange is recorded forever in every place that the crypto can be turned into something else (dollars, yen, chickens, pizzas, clock cycles, whatever). It does not require the intervention of a government, and it does not require thee or me to have any faith in one another whatsoever.

That has never happened before, ever, anywhere on planet earth.