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A comment on Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts. Parent comment

Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by x-complexity on Sunday November 05, 2023 @08:38PM (#38157794)
> How can I pay my bills with bitcoin while being debanked?

Acting as an alternative to krupan's Bitcoin-centric answer:

- There are other crypto rails other than Bitcoin that could be used in its place. USDC & stablecoins in general is going to be the medium-term winners in this space, as more services are set up to help people pay their bills with stablecoins. Here are 2 services that I've found within a few minutes of searching "USDC pay bill":

https://www.spritz.finance/blog/pay-bills-crypto

https://bitpay.com/bill-pay/

- As for transaction costs, L2s are already being deployed, and their fees will only be further reduced as improvements to the L2 networks are made.

https://l2fees.info/

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by Tao3300 on Sunday November 05, 2023 @09:25PM (#38158072)
> space

There's the signal. Don't trust anything this person says.

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by catlover76 on Sunday November 05, 2023 @09:43PM (#38158176)
huh?
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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by Tao3300 on Sunday November 05, 2023 @10:01PM (#38158292)
As a rule of thumb, people calling crypto a "space" are trying to hustle you.
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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by TheCapeGreek on Monday November 06, 2023 @02:22AM (#38159726)
huh?

I'm no crypto fanatic, but I call plenty of things a "space". It's basically a synonym for niche?

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by Tao3300 on Monday November 06, 2023 @07:24AM (#38161610)
Glad to hear that. Notice I said

> rule of thumb

Not to be confused with a universal law.

See also that the other comments pointed out that the USDC recommendation didn't even make a whole lot of sense. Hmm...

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by TheCapeGreek on Monday November 06, 2023 @09:46AM (#38163297)
My point is even as a rule of thumb it doesn't make sense.

You might as well just say that mentioning crypto at all is a red flag and call it a day.

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by Tao3300 on Monday November 06, 2023 @11:54AM (#38165069)
Whoa. You guessed my other rule!
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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by krupan on Sunday November 05, 2023 @10:03PM (#38158307)
USDC and stablecoins are centrally controlled and do not solve the problems that we are talking about here.
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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by FireBeyond on Sunday November 05, 2023 @10:11PM (#38158357)
From just one of those L2 networks:

> Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain.

I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by x-complexity on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @03:10AM (#38187877)
> > Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain.

> I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.

Term by term:

- EVM-equivalent: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the part that allows smart contract code can be run on the network. EVM-equivalency means that you can just drop in your smart contract code, and it has to run as it would on Ethereum itself.

- Optimistic Rollup: A Rollup is the current consensus for scaling up the network, by outsourcing compute to other networks, and pushing the important end state back into Ethereum. Optimistic rollups do this by assuming that there'll be at least 1 person to challenge a proposed block whenever that block's invalid. This setup however has the shortcoming of needing there to be a challenge window for other participants in the network to have time to respond.

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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by amjnsx on Monday November 06, 2023 @04:28AM (#38160416)
Just as an FYI, USDC & stablecoins (and CBDC's) are centralised and the same abuse of power is possible here too. Obviously being debanked in fiat and crypto at the same time is extremely unlikely...but possible if someone is REALLY out to get you.
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Re:Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts by x-complexity on Monday November 06, 2023 @09:00PM (#38172210)
> Just as an FYI, USDC & stablecoins (and CBDC's) are centralised and the same abuse of power is possible here too.

It's the unfortunate consequence of one gigantic unaddressable problem:

USD can only be minted efficiently by the Fed.

- Collateralized stablecoins exist, but they're inefficient in that they must be overcollateralized to cushion against falling asset values.

- USDC & their kind are efficient, but at the cost of being centralization vectors as a result of current US legislation

- An efficient synthetic stablecoin can exist, but it requires deep liquidity in the marketplace to keep the peg stable. (Probably > $100B at the ready to absorb panic sells) Synthetic stocks are the closest analogy available for this, but applied upon a currency. The chicken-and-egg means that bootstrapping something like this is not feasible at small scales: It needs to be big from the get go.

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