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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of this windy article? An allusion to "debanking people is OK actually!"

Allowing the bank remove your financial lifeline via some opaque and kafkaesque process where you have zero recourse is not OK and we should not tolerate it.

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This is specifically a response to Andreessen conflating crypto offboarding with "debanking" on Rogan. The goal is to inform you about the regulatory and political environment around banking and crypto in general, and to warn you to be wary when a crypto investor uses terms like "debanking" to rally favor for their cause, which is to integrate crypto into the banking sector.

The point is that reality is more complicated than short statements (which often embed political assumptions) can express, and understanding the reality of the situation is useful, especially to people who want to change the system.

There are many banks out there that aggressively complete.

This is a valid point. Banks should compete for customers by providing value. They should also be free to decline customers to ensure quality. However, debanking due to perceived or real regulatory risk is ultimately a political act. The banks may not be exclusively political actors, but they are incentivized to act outside of market concerns by state pressure.

Similarly, one of the alleged intentions of the cryptocurrency movement was to decouple the state from monetary control.

No it isn't political it's a "you guys are expensive and flighty and killed two banks that served you" decision. VCs pull money out of banks having a hard time while JP Morgan put money in.

there's really only a small number of banks in the US after the 2008 crash, they were all consolidated. what used to be thousands became like 3

At the end of 2023, there were still over 4000 commercial banks in the US.

https://banks.data.fdic.gov/explore/historical/?displayField...

> An allusion to "debanking people is OK actually!"

Literally the opposite of what he says. He says it happens too often to too many people, and that mostly it happens to people who are immigrants or don't speak english well or are financially illiterate, or just generally people at the margins, and not to privileged crypto bros.

>>> An allusion to "debanking people is OK actually!"

>Literally the opposite of what he says.

In that case the message is lost in the wall of text.

> What's the point of this windy article?

Ah, I had the same reaction (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387392).

Seems like an article meant to distract, or a someone nerding off on the nuances with no solutions offered.

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