281–290 of 452 posts
There is an excellent book called "Stalking Giants" [1] that covers this story nicely. It's a fun read (especially for South Africans) and was published recently.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.za/Capitec-Stalking-Giants-T-J-Strydom...
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Finance is heavily regulated. Disrupting a heavily regulated market is usually called ‘racketeering’ or ‘organized crime’.
Regulation is the racketeering. The central ringleader is the fed, who 'ease' money into thin air, bypassing the pesky annoyance of going around and collecting taxes to fund their private and public benefactors.
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…
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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I don't get the need for synchronous comms at all. I can book airplane tickets, food delivery, e-commerce generally, and most other things through a web interface. Not sure why I need to talk to somebody to get a mortgage aside from Know Your Customer but even then a short signing ceremony at the end would be best.
I think getting a mortgage might be a tad more of an impactful decision than ordering takeout... I'm not a boomer but I still would like to speak to someone in person before I sign an O(million$) loan.
Why? I’d much rather have anything said in writing.
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Just curious, why do you need a video chat? Can't you just have a phone call? I don't get the need to see someone's face
I don't get the need for synchronous comms at all. I can book airplane tickets, food delivery, e-commerce generally, and most other things through a web interface. Not sure why I need to talk to somebody to get a mortgage aside from Know Your Customer but even then a short signing ceremony at the end would be best.
Your pizza order needs no clarifications and if you get it wrong, it's just a pizza. If you misunderstand your mortgage you're looking at far more costly consequences.
I think services like Fidelity are meaningfully disrupting banks. I much rather have my money in a money market fund then a deposit checking account. Most loans are not being held on bank balance sheets any more either, but are getting sold to the market, so they're no longer as critical a part of the financing stack.
And we're still early days on stable tokens and the defi infrastructure around them.
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The big problem with amex/visa/mastercard is that it's a three sided market. So make it a 2 sided market, unify the processor into one of the sides. In other words, either a merchant co-operative or a consumer co-operative. In this case, a merchant co-operative seems a natural fit. The merchants jointly own the co-op, and get a refund of their fees proportional to the profit of the co-op. And you get the consumers on…
I don't see how this is going to work. Rewards cards already bribe me at 2% (and there are better offers). Big merchants often offer a store card, sometimes a store card that's also a general use card, but they typically bribe people with 5%.
Those big merchant store cards are a likely path for how my scenario plays out. Imagine if a half dozen of those big merchant store cards merge, ditch their visa/mastercard pairing and provide an attractive path for other merchants to join.
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> Regular mutual funds usually have higher risk ... than the ETFs. Can you provide some specific examples? If anything, the transaction friction around mutual funds prevents most regular investors from unnecessary trading that exchange-listed ETFs allow. TL;DR: For most people, more trading means more losses or worse returns.
There are several potential mutual fund problems, but the ones most consumers are exposed to arise from institutional and private "investment advisors". There is no legal protection from banks externalizing toxic assets acquired though risky decisions onto customers, and or ridiculous ballooning management fees siphoning off actual profit. The other issues are mostly from various end-runs around acceptable market rul…
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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.
By the way, if you thought that Trump was doing something illegal, which certainly sounds suspicious, well it isn't. This guy gives a good overview of the why https://x.com/wassielawyer/status/1881995797245600248
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Regulation is the racketeering. The central ringleader is the fed, who 'ease' money into thin air, bypassing the pesky annoyance of going around and collecting taxes to fund their private and public benefactors.
Hey, you can assert cops are the real criminals all you want - but one of them is thrown in jail, and the other (typically) isn’t.