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@ a***** r*** a****
2025-05-17 14:52:51
no, I'm not saying a bank should hold your Bitcoin for you, but isn't that what Coinbase is doing? the trad banks are eventually going to do the same, so there might as well be a Bitcoin-only intermediary in physical form.
if you want to keep your hard wallet in a vault that has more physical security than your home, you should have that option.
but what I'm moreso saying is that there aren't a lot of options with human integration for when people are dealing with large transactions, such as escrow, and trust still does matter to people there, even if the transacting method is 'trustless'.
total responsibility is great and works for a lot of people, but this isn't the Wild West in reality and there should be options for those who want to diffuse liability through a protected institution which operates on Bitcoin's core values of non-biased access.
the fact is that KYC itself has an ethical code that the consumer has no say in, but if, for example, you're the owner of a small reserve for your family, then you might want some level of control over those matters.
a physical bank itself is to put humans back in the loop, and to represent Bitcoin as a staple of real communities, which is important to the average consumer, while offering services that the defi projects are too slow at developing, disparate in function, and normal people don't understand.
the way things are going now, Bitcoin is becoming a stagnant asset that nobody wants to use as a currency except for some small transactions, as there are no trusted intermediaries which provide escrow services and smart contracts for larger ones.
imo, there is some wisdom to trad banking, but due to centralization, has essentially become a cartel operation, and Bitcoin removes cartel rule by default, though the functions in and of themselves are actually useful.
some level of mediated security is actually a good thing when you're dealing with high value transactions, but apps like Coinbase do this terribly because of the lack of basic customer service, which everyone complains about.