It’s also amazing how many smart people are completely ignorant of the common and routine failure modes of banks, and why hundreds of millions of people might want an alternative to that.

I just had to physically cross an ocean twice because my bank won’t send wires for more than $25k via their website, and that’s one of the gentler failure modes.

Here are some examples: https://old.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/pycgjx/what_in_the...

Retail banking in the USA is terrible.

It's really similar to running your own email server.