The terrifying AI catastrophe here is apparently that customers might finally move their money to accounts paying decent interest. Banks spent decades automating every trick to extract profit from us, but the second consumers automate looking for a better deal, suddenly it’s a systemic threat. Funny how innovation becomes dangerous the moment it works for the customer.
Banks are the largest mafia on the planet. They literally have a license to print money. Not even the government can do this. When things go south, they are bailed out with our money. Even after the worst crisis, they have a ridiculously low capital requirement of 2.5%.
Never expect criminal scum to just accept one of their sources of income being taken away.
Banks are the largest mafia on the planet. They literally have a license to print money
Elaborate. The government prints money, not banks.
No it doesn’t. The government has nothing to do with the money supply (as long as the CB is independent). Central banks create currency, commercial banks borrow from the central bank and create by far the largest part of money supply by giving loans.
Yet people write off Bitcoin as “for criminals” while glossing over the fact no one can print more of it, and it cannot be taken away from you (without you fucking up).
There is literally no better option in terms of holding and protecting your own wealth.
Yet still, in 2026, I can almost guarantee nothing but down votes and/or replies all about how it’s BS, etc, etc.
Not trying to be snarky, it’s just sad that the vast majority of people won’t ever get a good explanation of how it works.
I’m a bit torn on Bitcoin. I used to think the same as you, but now it seems to me that Bitcoin is way too easy to control. State actors could quite easily acquire enough hash power to take over the network, mining is too concentrated already. I think Monero is much more true to the original idea of Bitcoin, probably also one of the reasons it’s always branded as a coin for criminals, to prevent people from looking into it.
It’s also, unfortunately, just not that practical. Most people don’t want to be their own bank. Your “unless you fuck up” is not quite true, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your keys? That’s the true purpose of a bank, outsourced security.
While crypto is cool, it’s not required to solve this, full-reserve banking would be sufficient.
Hey crypto-investor! I’m letting you know I’m about to print my own crypto from the open-source bitcoin! Buy my alt-coins now! Your profits are about to go to the moon! Buy CON-coin! The only difference between it and bitcoin is hype and branding! Get in before it’s too late! Computers go brrrrrr infinite ponzi-schemes.
Banks were condemned for money laundering.
They helped drug traffickers to launder their blood money…5 billions of suspicious transactions in bank of america and they looked the other way.
Meanwhile Trump’s admins first 3 months saw him dismantle the agency division charged with monitoring and controlling laundering and financial crimes. Curious that.
Usually banks dislike money laundering in a form where they have to actively look away… They prefer to maintain plausable deniability…
Banks preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.
I find the article’s premise that optimizing individual returns will wreck the banking system very dubious. In all other parts of the financial system (risk-adjusted) greed is good, but when retail customers do it then it’s bad?
Almost like the system is designed to increase wealth inequality 🤯
I think people don’t appreciate how small a piece retail investors really have.
