Of course banks wouldn't go away with Bitcoin. There are still physical branches despite the ubiquity of online banking and credit/debit cards. People like having humans to interact with. And Bitcoin is trying to add in the Lightning network, which requires large trusted entities where people can store their coins for off-chain transactions, IE banks.

I doubt that they still believe that, as much as they are highly incentivized to claim that. Bitcoin is a disasterous enterprise as it continues to scale poorly. But hey, some people get rich (for a while) and others get to have a waking ideological wet dream, so who cares if it’s a tragic exercise in “printing” entropy and calling it value.

Whataboutism isn’t going to change that.

Besides, hasn’t the world suffered enough for the sake of grasping ideologues? Does everything need to be seen through these same bland lenses? This is a truly maddening and mad use of a currently limited resource with globally damaging externalities, and it produces nothing except waste heat.

If the average Joe really understood this, and just how modest the real potential of blockchain tech probably is, there would be lynchings.