"How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?"
The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
Its bizarre that this is such an unpopular idea, when if posted in a thread about anything other than crypto, it'd likely not be scoffed at this hard.
Yup, that's how it works in democracies...
I think this approach is just as wrong as saying "crypto is the answer".
I think you're misconstruing the original suggestion, which was that a legal solution to the problem of the unbanked would be viable. You could pass legislation mandating that banks turn no one away, you could establish a publicly run bank of last resort, etc.
I believe those measures would be "easier" solutions to the problem than replacing the entire financial system, but that's just an opinion about a hypothetical.
This is the one I'm specifically discussing, its from a different user. This is the line that started the thread. Plenty of users are discussing this specific line I believe.
> The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
and national health insurance is famously a fiendishly hard public policy issue (albeit one for which several competing models exist and have been put into practice). Working from an existing public policy model (like using France's example of offering bank-of-last-resort services through the postal service) still seems way easier than just deciding to solve it with crypto.
Yeah, I don't disagree that crypto won't fix this. I just disagreed that it was "easy". I took them as being literal.
Nobody here is advocating against democracy. People are just pointing out that blind trust in state institutions is equally as illogical as blind trust in the EVM. States have a track record of serving the powerful first, and sometimes exclusively. Trusting apparatus with a track record like this masks a sort of flawed optimism, just like putting your hopes of change in the blockchain.
Why would one look at history? Democracy is a modern phenomenon, and many modern states are republics, designed not to be full-blown democracies.
The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.
Literal nonsense.
English law is the preferred basis for cross-border contracts and English courts are the preferred venue for litigation between entities from different jurisdictions. This is very well attested - e.g. first result from Google:
https://www.qlts.com/blog/why-english-law-governs-most-inter...
They didn't propose replacing democracy.
Right, and saying "just pass a law" is asking the hall monitors to wave a wand.
1. Bad laws got us into this place
2. There's a lot of inertia in government
3. There's a lot of stake holders in government who don't have citizen's interests at heart
4. It's illogical to think you can, in light of this, just pass a law and fix it.
Yeah, we designed the law, and we know how it works. Sadly, we know also that the way it works is generally not how it should, and it has been co-opted often for the powerful.
It always baffles me why someone can't say "I'm opposed to X" without another person coming along and saying "that means you're in favor of Y". Don't respond to what you think I said, respond to what I actually said.
I didn't assume you supported crypto. I was pointing out that crypto has all the problems you specified as bad or worse.
> And crypto isn't dominated by the wealthy and being used to serve their ends? Open your eyes my friend
serve? Why would you mention something completely unrelated to their point, then tell them to open their eyes? To me it sounds like you're retroactively recasting your argument.
If I search for that phrase you are quoting/referencing in this thread, you are the only one using it.
I explained what point I was making. Do you have anything to contribute beyond attacking your strawman over and over?
Here is the "just pass a law" line. I've summarized a line that makes this exact point. I see no straw-men here. Can you point out where I make a straw-man? Genuinely interested in why you see this as creating a straw-man in my summary. I fail to see how else you can interpret other than 'just pass a law'.
Quotations marks imply a quote or a refernce to a term / phrase. When you deliberate misquote someone and then repeat that all over the thread as the basis for your argument, that is a strawman at best and pure bad faith at worst.
I see nothing in the line you are referencing that indicates any sort of blind trust is suggested. Even simple, easy legistlation works best when the trust it is based on is not blind.
Yeah, I'm done with this. I told you my objective was to summarize, you have decided I'm maliciously twisting someone's words. I'm not. I've told you as much. My misuse of quotation marks isn't proof in the pudding. I've explained multiple times, to you no less, my point but you've ignored it and have actually strawmanned it yourself. This is what you're doing right now actually by accusing me of random things.
I suggest you look into the "principal of charity". Its fine to disagree, but being hostile and accusatory isn't.
Read these while you're at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You've never explained how you got to the assumption that anyone here is suggesting "blind faith" in the government. Please go ahead and do that or don't claim you've "explained multiple times."
Honestly, this whole thing just makes me tremendously sad now.
It's slower and less sexy than new-tech and has a better track record.
it would be helpful to me if you could cite an example. i don't actually think this is true.
Sure there is. It's called "entrepreneurship". In fact, far more of the improvement in the human condition has come from it than the state.
It's astounding to me that we're on an Internet forum about startups, and people are saying that the only way to improve the world is through political activism.
Second, some of us have the experience of having been through, or been adjacent to, the social and political movements of the 1960s, which largely shunned actual political action in favor of personal change and the creation of new, non-state organizations. Despite the widespread availability of wholewheat bread in 2022, an honest retrospective analysis of this approach would have to conclude that it was largely a failure, at least in terms of the various goals involving widespread political and social change.
Thirdly, some of us have been a part of certain, ahem, startups that have gone on to be as much as part of "the problem" as anything that came before them, meaning that our expectation that entrepeneurial capitalism as the savior doesn't seem particularly promising either.
Sometimes the best fix is a disassembly.
As for "VPN being a scammer", this is all about trade-offs. If we had companies destroyed and robbed by VPN-powered ransomware, and we had plain people losing their life savings to VPNs, I'd argue for making VPN illegal. But it's not VPNs who are stealing people's money, it is cryptocurrencies.
That's a pretty American, libertarian take. As somebody who grew up in Western Europe, I'm not disillusioned by "the state" per se, and I think that the facts rather support that privatisation doesn't always make things better (e.g. railways). None of us may be "right" (it always depends on your experiences), but it's worth considering that "using the state to fix society" isn't a completely ridiculous take for everyone.
I'm not American. This take tends to come out of countries where the government has strayed away from its objective of serving the people. There are plenty of governments I'd trust, and not hold a libertarian view towards. Funny enough, most of these are European governments, so your point is well taken. That said, using the state to solve this problem isn't universally going to work. I bet Nordic nations could pull it off, if they've not already.
In short: if the government doesn't work for the people, and is structurally broken, I hold a libertarian perspective. If I see a government that works for the people, I lean neoliberal.
The lack of banking services for the poor is a market failure not a state failure.
State competition in markets that have failed to deliver necessary services has long been effective whether its through provision of housing or bare bones post office bank accounts.
It not only provides underserved communities it whips competitors into line because - surprise surprise - competition works.
It's the one weird trick parasitic oligarchs hate.
See: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...
LMAO. we wish bud.