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Comment by iamthirsty | Hacker News Reader

If you can explain to me — without gaining citizenship in another country, or spending any large amount of money — how I can open a bank account in a country with good bank protections (meaning my account wont arbitrarily be closed/bank wont fail, or the denomination within wont become worthless), you would be right. But I don't think that is the reality we live in.

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I think you could open an account in Revolut (Lithuania) fairly easily before the Russo-Ukrainian war (the 2022 escalation specifically). You can still sign up with them, but you need at least a work visa in the EU. Shameless plug: https://revolut.com/referral/aleksamc7!DEC1-22-VR-EE

You still can open account in Wise (UK / Belgium and other countries), though not from Iran I think (thanks to sanctions). It's not a bank but is an EMI and is regulated stricter than a bank. You can only order a card in handful of countries besides EU and the US, but for storing money it should OK. Shameless plug: https://ale.sh/r/wise

If you live in Iran though... good luck, you'll need it.

So, at the moment, you can't open a legit bank account.

Bitcoin allows you to open infinite free bank accounts and the contents are extremely hard to confiscate.

[redacted] fixes this

That's pretty much my point. It isn't technically infeasible but rather infeasible due to collusion of governments in the form of KYC/AML and other tyrannies against the populace.

This is valid but a half-point. I still have rather bitter memories of my brick-and-mortar bank slowly bleeding my checking account dry during a period of low income for 'failure to maintain a minimum balance.' Public overreach and private greed are two sides of the same coin, and addressing one without the other is a bit facile. The tyrannies you describe are often tolerated and sometimes engineered by economic incumbents who want to maintain their dominant position.

It's not that I think your view is wrong so much as incomplete.

A back-handed compliment is the closest I ever get to a real one on HN, so I'll take it.

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