As I wrote earlier, in the banking system, if you want to put your money in a deposit account to receive premium, you transfer your money to a bank deposit account XXXX, thereby the bank understands that XXXX is a deposit account and interest must be accrued on it at the end of each t period. But in the banking system you do not actually own the money in that account. It is just an account the bank has opened for you, but all the money in that account belongs to the bank, and you only have the right to demand the money and the premium from it, according to the contract with the bank. That is, you have the right to demand from the bank to do the operations you need, but it’s not a fact that the bank will always be able to do them. There are plenty of examples in history of banks defaulting on their obligations for a variety of reasons. Moreover, in recent years, following the Cyprus crisis, a variety of legislation was introduced throughout the western world, that makes so calles “bail-ins” legal and even required by the law under some circumstances. As such, it is not so much a question of if, but a question of when your bank deposits will be confiscated.
Let’s look at some situations where you can’t get your hard-earned money from the bank from your account.
For example, the bank may go bankrupt and if your deposit wasn’t insured, you won’t get a cent.
An example from my life: unfortunately, I was in another country, on covid quarantine, but I needed to pay a rather large bill urgently. I called the bank, where I was told that I had to visit their office in person to pay such an amount. As you can imagine, I had neither the right nor the ability to fly to another country to visit that bank branch. I explained the whole situation to my banker; however, I was politely turned away. As sad as it was, I was never able to use the money in my account. The only salvation then was cryptocurrency, with the help of which I paid my bill without intermediaries within 10 minutes. Of course, I am no longer a customer of this European bank.
Another very common option of blocking money, gaining momentum recently in the global banking system is Anti Money Laundering (AML) policy. It is very simple: if your bank has even the slightest suspicion that your money were earned in a gray area, the bank must block your account. If you mined Bitcoin in 2012, but didn’t keep receipts for the purchases of computers and video cards, you’re in trouble. Usually all assets are blocked until you provide proof of the origin of the funds, i.e. the presumption of innocence does not work in this case. The main problem is that the bank has no clear criteria how you have to prove that you earned the money honestly. Moreover, the standart of proof bank demands often changes on a whim of a bank. In some cases banks simply increase required standard of proof as they receive previously required proof from their victims. Sometimes this is leading to situations where cost of providing such a proof is higher than the amount of money in the question.
My personal opinion about AML regulation is that it is just another way to control and take money from ordinary people along with inflation, mortgages, loans, devaluation, and many other tools.
This is why banks oppose cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, blockchains, and all decentralized systems. If humanity moves to decentralized, transparent systems, states and banks will simply lose their power - the “leash” on which they keep their clients.
And the situation is completely different in case you want to get interest from staking in cryptocurrencies. With staking, you open YOUR personal staking address (analogous to a bank account), which belongs only to YOU. Only YOU have access to manage this address and no one can block it. Your coins are safe and there is no one to ask you silly questions about their origin. And this is the most important difference, why staking is many times more reliable than a deposit in any bank. Achi blockchain and staking is permisionless.
Happy staking!
05/24/2022