German parliament passes bill allowing banks to sell and store cryptocurrencies

Something like this:

The five eyes are trying to ban crypto! The government wants to be able to access your life savings when it inevitably all goes digital!

I had the impression Satoshi was relatively matter of fact about Bitcoin, but I haven't read much of his/her/their own words.

Maybe in a decade or three, it will be possible to pay taxes in a cryptocurrenty too.

For now, we should be careful and observe as the technology evolves and the impact of cryptocurrencies on markets and society increases.

Nope! There are many people that are censored which have broken no laws, have not been charged with any crimes, and yet the banking system tries to block their payments anyway.

By making the transaction on the blockchain, PayPal, who whoever, can't just decide, on a whim to block your transactions arbitrarily, even though no law has been broken.

An example that comes to mind is WikiLeaks. There was a time when donations to WikiLeaks were blocked, through the credit card system, even though they were not charged with any crimes.

Yet the Bitcoin transactions succeeded, and nobody was sent to jail for donating to WikiLeaks.

Financial censorship is something that is often done even though people have broken no laws, and the act of the financial censorship itself is actually the illegal action.

This has nothing to do with people breaking laws. The most common financial censorship is done, arbitrarily, to people who have not broken any laws, have not been charged with any crime, and who will never been able to defend themselves in a court.

Stopping this kind of financial censorship, is extremely valuable.

When I first heard a politician announce that at a start-up conference, I had to double check that really talked about the implementation and not the law to be in force. And the guy was the (deputy-) head of parliament's digitalization council. Not sure just how the German government, and society, think a digital world is going to look like.

Never seen an ATM with opening hours, other than ones located inside shopping malls where the entire mall completely closes during the nights.

I never had an ATM refuse my card, tho. The worst was some steep fees (see below).

>Why does it cost so much (or anything?) to withdraw?

Because banks are in the business of making money ;) Seriously tho, most Germans do not pay for withdrawals, you "just" have to remember to go to an ATM of your bank or one of their partners, which admittedly you have to know about and then it's a bit of a hassle.

>Why are your businesses not accepting cards, or only accepting some cards with weird details like "CCs only German, other cards only EU"?

Now that's actually more of an issue, indeed. I think it's a combination of

- Germans still really loving their cash, so everybody usually has at least a few bucks in cash with them,

- Germans always being a bit conservative about new tech (that can lose them money or get their persoanl and/or banking data into the wrong hands),

- Germans really despising when somebody in front of them wants to pay for small purchases slowly with a card (insert into reader, type PIN and/or sign) instead of quickly with some cash

- and small shops not wanting to go through the hassle of setting up this stuff. Both legal and also the tech aspects are a burden; there is a lot of red tape to get accepted by upstream processors and CC companies; and the system isn't exactly unified either. Especially small independent shops that usually sell stuff at a few bucks per customer do not really seem to see the point in offering card payments. And from what I heard, purely anecdotal and second hand, it's far more of a hassle to get set up to accept credit cards, especially issued by foreign banks, than German bank cards, so that may explain why some shops will accept some card but not others.

Then again, everything that's part of a chain or franchise usually accepts cards, and most actual restaurants do too (but some still don't, which can lead to a lot of awkwardness once you try to pay), as do virtually all gas stations, and so on.

As a German, that's just something you're used to and expect: The people in the doner shop or asian food truck or Kiosk (newsagent/corner shop) will stare blankly at you if you want to pay your less than 10 bucks with a card, even when they accept cards.

Anyway, banks been rolling out contactless payment systems recently, which might change things for small item purchases finally (or rather eventually). Which, of course, is an area where Germany lacked behind.