How Banks React to Bitcoin?

What do you foresee will be the most likely reactions of incumbents – banks and regulators towards bitcoin?

I wrote a blog post about “The Five Stages of Grief” and you can check it here.

It starts with denial: “Clearly, this is a silly technology that cannot possibly work and Bitcoin will be dead soon.” That stage lasted for the first three years of Bitcoin.

Then it switches to anger: “This is not correct. Make it illegal. Ban it. Only criminals use it. It must be stopped.” That lasted for about a year and didn’t work either.

Then we went to the third stage of grief, which is bargaining: “Bitcoin is not that interesting. Blockchains are really interesting. We should do “blockchains,” but without any of the things that Bitcoin does. Maybe we can keep all of the control, power, centralization and do “blockchains,” and that way we won’t be disrupted.”

That stage has been ongoing since the middle of 2014 until today. That is not going to work.

The most interesting things that Bitcoin does is because it is open, decentralized, uncensorable, immutable, and unforgeable. You can get some advantages with blockchains, but you will get more disadvantages if you implement blockchain without the cryptocurrency.

Then they will go to depression: “Awwwhhh… but we had such a good run for two centuries!”

“Why is everyone taking away our business now?”

“Why do young people not want to bank Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:00pm, with high fees?”

“Why do they want all these cryptocurrencies instead, that work 24 hours per day?”

“That is unfair!”

Finally, there will come acceptance. At which point I am hoping that the banking industry will realize that if you want to reach customers, if you want to make this an economy not of 1 or 2 billion people of the most financially privileged people, but make it global with 8 billion, included poor human beings, then Bitcoin is a solution and not a problem. It is a promise, not a threat. Then we all win.

About the author

Satoshi Nakamoto

We developed bitcoin. This post is derivated from aantoop yt video with same headline under cc by license.

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