For the gym it is people who aspire to go to the gym, not simply forget. Canceling the membership is admitting failure in this mindset

True but even cancelling is a difficult process. My husband had to go in to his old gym with utility bills from our new house and a highlighted version of the paperwork he signed, showing that he could cancel because we had moved.

It is interesting to see how different gym cultures across the world are.

Here people will usually pre-pay a certain # of entries or a certain time period, often with cash, and no one asks for any details except name. Hard-to-cancel recurring membership isn't a thing.

We do not have many gym chains, though.

That's one reason I'm long-term hopeful about Smart Contracts. If they are adopted, they may force/encourage a re-evaluation about all kinds of things, including predatory aspects of banking. For example, let's reconsider if poor people should really be hit with extra charges when they hit $.0 on their bank account.

Smart Contracts are not something a normal person can understand. You overestimate your own intelligence and peoples diligence and willingness to tolerate complexity.

But smart contract, demand standardized interaction interfaces to work the world. Basically they depend on the automatability of all legal work / bureaucracy.

That's fair, but brand reputation can carry society past that.

They could be defeated in multiple ways, as can most business models... good and ugly. The ones that exist are the ones that survived.

That said, they exist because it works. There's no way FB could make the money it makes by selling its product to consumers, but it can by snooping, manipulating and advertising. Banking goes in cycles and modes, but it's one ugly after another usually. Maybe they make steady, risk free profits while externalizing long tail risks. Maybe they enjoy a low competition regulated market that lets them fleece captive customers. Etc.

The oldest law codes we have show evidence of bankers being bold, usury and whatnot.

In a lot of the big, egregious examples (FB, Citibank, etc.)... killing the abuse would be turning a $1trn industry into a $1bn industry. It's certainly possible to do social media or consumer banking in a much smaller/cheaper way.