Two things can be true at once, and I fail to see how crypto is going to keep American consumers from getting scammed when the one constant for crypto has been rugpulls and scams perpetrated on people giving crypto companies money.

you are absolutely right that crypto is the wild west right now and people are getting scammed left and right, unfortunately. That being said to experienced crypto users the difference between banking with crypto and banking with banks is night and day. Crypto is far superior. So in the long run I expect as the infrastructure around crypto improves, and the scammers are beaten back, that will extend to every day retail users as well.

Exactly. All one needs to do is just to buy Bitcoin and hold it yourself. Everything else is noise at best, scam at worse, including the fiat banking system once it unpegged from its gold backing.

Bitcoin may be useful like Gold is useful, but it's the other chains like Ethereum and NEAR that provide tremendous value. The velocity of money on NEAR (and its closest competitors I'm sure, but I don't know enough about those) is so fast and I am able to conduct business with people across the world orders of magnitude faster than was previously possible. Banks will never catch up. Crypto still has some kinks to work out, particularly for less tech savvy users, but the fundamentals are so so much better than the existing banking networks. Try doing international business at 5am on a Sunday with a bank.

Credit unions exist and that hasn't stopped the overdraft charges and fees, has it?

Why would crypto?

Because you can custody your own money.

Both issues have the same cause. A firm that scams it’s customers will have more money for marketing than an honest one, all else equal. Still there’s a big difference between overdraft fees, which are part of the terms of service, and outright theft of assets held in trust in violation of contract with a proven intent to defraud.

> A firm that scams it’s customers will have more money for marketing than an honest one, all else equal

That’s a smart way to put it. Also explains why I saw FTX marketed so much more heavily than Coinbase.

Why does the US have such poor consumer protection? If the banks are so universally unpopular, and provide such terrible service, how is this not a political issue?

(note that you don't pay overdraft fees unless you have an overdraft, and crypto does not permit overdrafts at all ..)

> Why does the US have such poor consumer protection?

European snark: Because "muh freedumb!!!" should also apply to businesses because businesses are people, Citizens United has proven that.

Reality: because consumer protection laws can cost businesses quite a lot of profit, so they do everything they can to lobby for lax consumer protection. An entire party's ideology boils down to a "lean government" model where the government only does the bare minimum to keep the lights running and private companies do everything else.

> If the banks are so universally unpopular, and provide such terrible service, how is this not a political issue?

It is, but banks have completely bought off Congress by donations.

> note that you don't pay overdraft fees unless you have an overdraft

Banks have been accused of manipulating the order of account credit and debit transactions to artificially generate overdraft fees for over a decade [1][2], and Wells Fargo was embroiled in many years of court battles to keep that cash cow alive [3].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/02/22/are-b...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/06/11/yes-b...

[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/wells-fargo-could-take-overdr...