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Comment by thegreatpeter | Hacker News Reader

Every bank will get involved in crypto if they haven’t already

I remember when the entire point of crypto was to avoid banks

And now the crypto is going to be in the banks.

design wise, crypto looks most like banks being wallets and blockchains being a way for banks to agree on interbank transfers

Banks like to be able to reverse transactions. As do courts.

Banks mostly deal in stablecoin which tend to be reversible, freezable, etc by court order since they're permissioned not permissionless.

But in that case you just have a really inefficient database, and the entire point of the Rube Goldberg apparatus is gone. You don't need to solve the Byzantine Generals problem with a trustless system when you are trusting someone.

Because there is no energy efficient way to do an interbank transfer right? Right?

Without KYC or AML, no.

Crypto does not exempt you from KYC and AML requirements.

I didn't claim there was an exemption, but exemption or not the ways still exist. I'm claiming in practical reality bypassing kyc and aml is far more practical with crypto. Your comment is 99% academic without the context of reality.

It kind of does if the transfer is not between regulated entities. If you transfer crypto from one private wallet to another who is going to know you as a client?

I remember when that was the point of Bitcoin. Just about every other crypto out there is more fiat than fiat itself is, between centralization and arbitrary issuance.

And it still is for many; the banks just sort of want to throw their two cents in about that. And it turns out, the worst thing about bitcoin is that it's money for enemies; nobody can stop them from doing so (well, aside from their own regulators). Sort of how something being permissionless works.

That was never the entire point of crypto. That was probably a point you tethered yourself to avoid it, etc. You don't seem like a fan.

Quite the opposite actually. In 2008-2010 most of the conversations I was involved with around crypto were around how dangerous fiat currency can be, and how valuable it is to have an algorithmically scarce resource that couldn't be printed by a central bank while still enabling digital transfers. The conversations were steeped in lack of trust of central banks, and it felt like a techno-splinter group of the Occupy movement. What conversations around crypto were you having during this time?

Mostly I was surprised by the indecision to modify the original bitcoin protocol to allow for more transaction throughput and the vast amount of energy that the bitcoin blockchain ending up consuming. Furthermore, while I understood the potential for fraud I was not expecting both the volume of fraudsters and the scope of some individual frauds.

Every bank? I suspect that at least a few banks will be prudent. I hope there's some way to tell which banks are heavily into crypto and which aren't.

Every bank. Stable coins like USDC (Circle) are going to continue growing! It processes billions of dollars of payments each year.

Most banks specialize quite a bit, they aren’t going to jump in unless crypto gets 100x as large as it is now and the growth just isn’t there.

Most are not keen due to anti money laundering.

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