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Comment by peterpost2 | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see my bank on that list.

Why do you want your bank telling you what you can do with your own money?

If you don't want to buy crypto, don't? I don't need a middle man for that.

I don't want my bank to decline my debit card when I have the funds. But I appreciate that they do it as a measure to evade fraud, because I've had that kind of fraud perpetrated on me and, prior to that, it was easy to imagine that it could happen. So a little friction in my transactions is a cost not a benefit of my banking. But the benefit I get from that cost is fraud protection.

Same thing applies here. If crypto were, on a measure, as fraudulent as it was not, then this might be heavy-handed. But as it is currently the source of more fraudulent activity, at least as it concerns these banks, than forthright activity, I'm happy for my bank to toll the cost of preventing crypto financial exchanging, for the benefit of fraud protection.

YMMV, of course. Different strokes for different folks. But, like the parent commenter, I'm happy with how my bank purports to handle crypto transactions.

But if someone has access to your account information in such a way that they can make purchases in your name isn't that a you, or your bank, problem? Couldn't that same person just spend the money elsewhere?

I'm just trying to understand the scenario here: you are caught up in a fraud, and unknowingly you give the fraudster access to information that they are able to leverage to make fraudulent purchases in your name and the 'win' here is that they can't spend it on crypto?

It seems like there are multiple points at which to address this problem prior to how they're spending your money.

Edit: I guess a lot of the comments are talking about the scam being that you are scammed into purchasing crypto somehow, a different scenario than someone having control of your account. Still though: people have been successfully swindling over the phone for a century. Having someone buy Monero instead of a wire transfer is just procedural.

Banks already do a lot of stuff to prevent their customers from being scammed, or engaging in criminal activities like drug dealing or money laundering. Since this is pretty much what crypto currencies seem to be used for, this is just another thing on that list of shady activities.

This has nothing to do with protecting customers from scams but everything with US pushed extreme AML policies and laws. The banks have to show the money trail and they worry the can’t with crypto so they just block it so they can tick regulatory boxes while shitting all over their customers. It’s very much not a good thing or because of you, the dear client.

No one cares until their account gets randomly closed without recourse.

Hey, don't diss cryptocurrencies like that! They're not only good for pedestrian crimes like drug dealing and money laundering, cryptocurrency is the the currency of choice for the sophisticated criminal - the ransomware operator, the tax dodger, and the sanctions evader love it!

> If you don't want to buy crypto, don't? I don't need a middle man for that.

I already don’t! But I also want my parents to be safe from the modern day equivalent of tech support scam, and good to see that some banks are being proactive about it.

Not OP, but I imagine they want their bank to agree with their viewpoint on crypto, and stop other customers creating risks by association.

I put my money in a bank to keep it safe. I'm not a bank or a fraud department, so I'm okay with the bank I trust to keep my money safe putting the brakes on something their experience says might be a problem.

My bank isn't on this list, but I wouldn't mind at least getting a text or app notification asking me to confirm it in the unlikely event I ever did anything with cryptocurrency.

I’d appreciate it not being at all possible to transfer funds from my bank to a crypto exchange. If my account has any connection with crypto there’s some kind of crime in progress.

e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/s/X2qBxazYm6

You can do whatever you want with your money - the bank just doesn't want to get involved in money laundering and other criminal stuff.

I pay, indirectly, for deposit insurance and bail outs.

Agreed. It's handy to have a list of banks I can trust to not do anything stupid with the money.

> It's handy to have a list of banks I can trust to not do anything stupid with the money.

That would be a list of banks that never - auth funds to dodgy looking overseas entities but will still lock your card for getting gas 4 counties away.

A list of banks that never did that would be meaningfully helpful. Alas, no helpful lists.

You need your bank to allow you what you can do with your money?

This is quite clearly a list of banks that will prevent you from doing one stupid thing with your money, but will not prevent you from doing many other stupid things with your money.

I'm fairly certain banks were doing stupid stuff with your money long before Bitcoin was invented...

Either you've a very short term memory or you are just very ignorant of what banks do with your money.

Would be funny to see someone fork this and just change "blacklist" to "whitelist".

Happy to oblige: https://github.com/Frizlab/BanksAgainstBitcoin

Or denylist/allowlist to abandon that outdated language.

Or keep blacklist/whitelist since it comes from black and white which are colors and have nothing to do with race.

Rewriting etymology makes no sense IMHO. I kind of understand wanting to get rid of slave/master (though I’m not for it either, after all it is slaves and master when used in IT; we should not be afraid of words, but that’s another rant), but for black and white list it makes no sense to want to get rid of it AFAICT, apart from definitely saying black and white persons are indeed different.

When using stupid rules to rule the words, we get stupid things, like people wanting to change the word history to his or herstory. Yes, seriously.

We have to stop.

Which (the outdated language) is the language that 99% of the english speaking world still use and which was fine until 5 minutes ago.

I use permit/reject since they have the same number of letters - lines up nice.

I've seen block/allow used. Same number of letters as black/white.

Did you just match the order of the previous poster, associating the word "deny" with a prefix that has been used to harass and marginalize society's most vulnerable for hundreds of years?

How dare you?

No.

I look forward to your post about how your bank randomly closed your account with no recourse based on a risk profile they do not have to tell you about

that is what banks like the ones on this list do

Right, and he may be happy about it. Some people just suffers of the Stockholm Syndrom.

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