As Bitcoin approaches $40k for the second time this month, we’re continuing to see huge institutional resistance.
This week the IMF’s Christine Lagarde said Bitcoin was conducting “funny business”, alluding in particular to money laundering. This is the kind of hypocrisy that underlines exactly why people are moving away from the entrenched financial establishment and towards crypto.
Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and HSBC, stalwarts of the same banking mafia Lagarde represents, were implicated last September in $2 trillion’s worth of money laundering, stretching from 1999 to 2017. $2 trillion! Whatever money does happen to be laundered through cryptocurrencies (an estimated $2.8bn in 2019) pales into insignificance compared to that figure.
HSBC are guilty of further still: just months after controversies over ostensibly anti-democratic political moves in Hong Kong, their retail banks in the U.K. have announced they are to ban customers withdrawing profits from crypto exchanges into their accounts. This should be a huge red flag, and a signal to HSBC users to pack up and leave.
The decentralised nature of crypto allows for fairly easy circumnavigation of these restrictions. Although big exchanges are useful in providing access to large scale liquidity, they are not essential to the cryptocurrency market — P2P exchanges like BISQ offer a genuinely viable alternative.
If banks were to try and exclude individuals making direct cash-for-crypto transactions with other individuals, as in peer-to-peer trades, we really would be living in a dystopian sci-fi novel. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.
The beauty of crypto — maybe even the whole point — is that as long as a small pocket of the internet remains truly free (such as that being occupied by Gab right now), draconian jurisdictions (see the FCA’s increasing hostility towards crypto) will not be able to effectively curtail financial privacy and freedom.
As the old saying goes, “if you’re getting a lot of flak, then you know you’re over the target.” The banking mafia knows the gig is up. Their days are numbered, and they’re flinging whatever they can at their young usurper. But their demise is inevitable. They can’t stop what is coming.
