141–150 of 452 posts
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Yes and crypto doesn’t have any inherent risk like a sitting President creating a crypto currency where he has 80% of the currency, will probably make a half billion dollars and then do a rug pull. https://fortune.com/2025/01/22/donald-trump-net-worth-memeco...
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No one is disrupting banks because the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air, and no upstart fintech company has this power. To gain this power requires the creation of a bank, which as you can imagine, is probably the most gate-kept activity on earth. Andreesen talked about this in his Rogan appearance. The banks and gov brought the hammer down on crypto because it was a legitimate threat…
Every bank does that. The US has more than 4,000 of them.
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No. Fiat is backed by tax base. US has more assets than debt. Additionally US is the largest economy in the world, how much would the right to tax it be worth? A lot. It's not at all just perception and influence as you claim.
US economy has been second largest for over 10 years now [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
The products being pointed out in this article as an attempt to disrupt banks seem to be basically the same product for a different price. Like, a high-yield savings account is just a savings account with a better price, right? How do you disrupt an industry by selling the same products? The advantage of startups is that they're more nimble, can pivot to fit the market better, and can adapt to customer requests faste…
This is a very US centric article, a lot of the disruptions listed are incumbent 'big bank' products in other jurisdictions. I feel the lack of adaptability is likely a result of US market conditions/regulations rather than lack of innovation.
No one is disrupting banks because the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air, and no upstart fintech company has this power. To gain this power requires the creation of a bank, which as you can imagine, is probably the most gate-kept activity on earth. Andreesen talked about this in his Rogan appearance. The banks and gov brought the hammer down on crypto because it was a legitimate threat…
> the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air Every bank does that. The US has more than 4,000 of them.
They might not be disrupting them, but they are definitely causing competition in the market place again. My main bank account is with Halifax, everyday spend is with Starling. Then Monzo for anything risky. Before Starling/Monzo the Halifax app was _crap_. Barely got any updates and was very basic. Now? The Halifax app is on par with the newer banks, and sometimes even release new features before (e.g. scan cheque i…
Interesting... We've had scanned check deposits at Chase (US) for at least 15 years, I think.
In the UK, I can't remember the last time I wrote or received a cheque. Maybe twice in the 17 years I've been living here, and certainly not in the last decade.
So with UK cheque usage being a tiny fraction of the US rate, there's simply no demand for it in banking apps.
No one is disrupting banks because the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air, and no upstart fintech company has this power. To gain this power requires the creation of a bank, which as you can imagine, is probably the most gate-kept activity on earth. Andreesen talked about this in his Rogan appearance. The banks and gov brought the hammer down on crypto because it was a legitimate threat…
> the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air Every bank does that. The US has more than 4,000 of them.
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Crypto has never posed a credible threat to any aspect of the establishment, and it never will. Need proof? You don't have to go through an arduous screening process to acquire and deploy compute. The finance industry saw a pool of dumb money forming and predictably decided they'd like a slice of the action.
> an arduous screening process to acquire and deploy compute That right there is more unlikely than crypto becoming a credible threat to the banking establishment. If you want to see a lot of dead bodies of rich people in the street, tell the rest of the world they can't have their smartphone and laptop and Xbox and Playstation. That's a great way to get yourself killed.
Banks are the most immune to disruption, because they function so closely with government, and they are nothing without the blessing of government. And the hurdles to create your own bank are very high. Check out this great Netflix documentary "Bank of Dave": A moderately successful businessman decided to start his own bank, just to see if it could be done (and to lower fees for his local community). The results are.…
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Yes and crypto doesn’t have any inherent risk like a sitting President creating a crypto currency where he has 80% of the currency, will probably make a half billion dollars and then do a rug pull. https://fortune.com/2025/01/22/donald-trump-net-worth-memeco...
That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Which leads me to believe that the only thing that could be honestly said is that a crypto is purely about winners and suckers and timing.
Even the scarcity is artificial, and based something between a contract and a gentleman's agreement, not any physical reality.
That is, the bitcoin software can be changed if enough people want to, to make more of it. And you can create infinite copies of bitcoin software and call it bitcoin or something else.
That's simply not true for the scarcity of gold.
Finally, insofar as there are uses for the blockchain, the ostensible finite volume of bitcoin has no bearing on anything, as you don't need 'one of 21 million bitcoin' for its blockchain functionality, you can use 0.1 or 0.0001 bitcoin. It's infinitely divisible, and a small unit of bitcoin can get you blockchain functionality.
And yet I've begun to put 5% of my monthly savings into it, as it seems to have become the long-term speculative asset. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But it really appears like an utterly ridiculous proposition, a self-fulling prophecy.