“OIG Investigators found that the DEA paid one airline employee tens of thousands of dollars over the past several years in proceeds from cash seized as a result of their tips. However, the vast majority of those airport seizures aren’t accompanied by criminal prosecutions. This has led to years of complaints from civil liberties groups that the DEA is abusing civil asset forfeiture—a practice that allows police to seize cash and other property suspected of being connected to criminal activity such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never arrested or charged with a crime.”
It actually works very well in those kinds of situations. People like that are constantly getting booted from the banking system and financial services. So crypto is a very good fit for that. Some of the very first people to use Bitcoin back in like 2010 and 2011 was WikiLeaks. After they were cut off from the Visa network, they were cut off from PayPal and other money transfer businesses and they were cut off from their bank accounts and they would have shut down had it not been for the funding they got through Bitcoin. There are a few industries that are perfectly legal that are just morally dubious to some people and therefore get kicked out of the banking system quite easily. Take a look at Operation Choke Point and Operation Choke Point 2.0.
I’m sure this will all be very convincing to get your average people to replace their existing bank account with that
You could take a look at the bank bail-ins in Cyprus in like 2013, where anybody with over $100,000 worth of assets had all their money taken from them by this Cyprus government in order to stabilize the banks. How would you feel if the equivalent of your 401k that you were relying on for retirement was just taken away to stabilize a failing bank? Sure, because your money helped stabilize the bank, you get stock in the bank. But who on earth would want stock in a just failed bank?
I’m sure this will all be equally convincing to get your average people to replace their existing bank account with that
Yeah, most people aren’t going to figure it out until they’ve been really hurt, and then they’ll be looking for something else. Pain is the only thing that makes habits change quickly. Otherwise, they either will not change or will only change extremely slowly.
And maybe, just maybe this is a solution in search of a problem for 99% of people and you crypto bros are grossly overestimating how useful this stuff really is. When the world runs on the dollar (or whatever your local currency is), you either need to convert to/from your so-called money to what the rest of the world is using, or you can bet that they’re immediately doing it for you on the other side.
Not everywhere will. Those businesses and individuals who believe in the philosophy of why crypto was needed to begin with either won’t convert anything at all or will convert as little as they need in order to survive and keep the rest. We also seek out individuals and businesses who agree with our philosophy and do business with them in order to help build a circular economy whenever possible. Thankfully, that is getting easier and easier as time goes on.
I think you’re severely overestimating how many people match that description.
I also noticed you never said anything about my point that early adopters stand to benefit by quite a lot if the world were to move to some kind of crypto. Do you agree that would be the case?
We have our own platforms where we can easily find each other in order to connect for circular economy purposes. And yes, somebody in crypto would easily benefit if people moved to a crypto standard because they took the risk early. I’ve recently been seeing chatter about governments around the world trying to tax people on their crypto holdings because they got in early and it’s not fair to everybody else. Well, everybody else didn’t take the risk.