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Actually, we really don't need a banking system.
Nathan Schneider

Then why is that what so many crypto people seem obsessed with recreating before anything else?

@ntnsndr I don't know these crypto people you're referring to.

Most of DeFi? Custodial exchanges?

@ntnsndr So... there are a few things:

1. I'm not getting notifications of your replies for some reason (so if I reply late, that's why).

2. DeFi and Custodial exchanges are two completely opposite things, so you cannot list them to make your point. It just doesn't make sense if you say that.

3. Custodial exchanges might as well be classified as "banking system".

4. That leaves "DeFi". DeFi is not a reinvention of what I mean by "banking system", although you're right, it does reinvent some traditional finance concepts on the blockchain. Let's say that hopefully defi will be "banking system - the good parts", e.g. the ability to trade assets in a decentralized way - e.g. decentralized exchanges, a very good/necessary thing and very much needed and very much not what I mean by "banking system".
@ntnsndr 5. I shouldn't have really said "banking system - the good parts" in my previous post, as it's misleading and suggests that decentralized exchange is something the banking system has, which is untrue. There is no decentralized exchange in the banking system, so those parts of defi are a brand new way to do something that was previously done in a very crappy way. So, yes, that part is a "reinvention", but it a very much needed one, and not representative of "the banking system", because exchange in the banking system is, well, completely different. How is it different? Let me list the ways:

- KYC required
- Monday through Friday required
- 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM in a specific timezone required
- Very strict / difficult rules for getting listed in the first place
- Secret societies with special privileges who get to trade before anyone else

This renders it close to unusable. It should really disappear. This isn't how exchange of assets should be done. It's horrible.

This isn't to say that some of defi is not without its warts - most specifically there are scams in defi just as there are scams in "the banking system", but getting rid of scams is unfortunately seemingly not possible without destroying several other desirable properties of decentralized exchange.
@ntnsndr And all of that is specific to #defi. When I said "banking system", I was referring to something else:

- The way money is created in the traditional financial system
- The way money is held in the traditional financial system
- The way money is sent from one entity to a different entity in the traditional financial system

The way all of this is done can be replaced with something else that is more modern, more private, more faster, more direct, and has far less red tape to deal with.
@ntnsndr None of these words will mean anything to anyone unless that person has actually tried to create an app that sends money anywhere.

I am not convinced that it is any less a corruptible banking system if does the same things digitally, only with no accountability to democratic governance. At least the Fed has to care about inflation & unemployment. Bitcoin miners and Uniswap holders couldn't care less about those.

Opening hours is simply a relic of inherited tech and norms; that stuff will surely change with time. But it light also serve as a useful reminder that life should be possible outside of the eternal churning of financial markets.

It seems to me that as long as there is money and capital deployment, there will be a banking system. The question is what kind we have and what it is accountable to.

I would love to see a DeFi poised to be more humane than the status quo, but for now I am not seeing it.

@ntnsndr You say "At least the Fed has to care about inflation & unemployment" as if that were true. I see little evidence for that. I see a lot of evidence to the contrary: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The difference between the fed and cryptocurrency is that with cryptocurrency you at least know what the economics are. With the fed, there is no transparency, just a centralized cartel that creates inflation through money printing. Why worship this cartel? It's not like they care about you.

Money printing should not be something only one evil corrupt group on earth gets to do. Anyone should be able to do it. Let there be competition among the money printers.

The banking system as it exists should be replaced with a better system, because it's currently serving no one except this evil cartel, and it plans on morphing into something even worse with its CBDC nonsense.
WTF Happened In 1971?WTF Happened In 1971?"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." - F.A. Hayek 1984
BTW @feld do you have any idea why I'm not getting notifications for @ntnsndr?
@taoeffect @ntnsndr my guess would be that it's because the replies to you do not mention you by tagging your account -- @taoeffect -- and Mastodon is not including an explicit mention of the author of the activity being replied to, so when we process the data we don't know who is really meant to be notified
@feld @ntnsndr are you saying #pleroma won't notify anyone when a mastodon user replies to them?
@taoeffect @ntnsndr originally the only way to notify anyone was with an inline mention -- by tagging their account. It's ugly, I hate it, a bunch of people rallied around this and got direct mentions working so you don't need to tag them to be able to notify them; it could be done in the UI outside the text content.

My only guess is that they're not including your tag in their reply and the client they're using (phone app, custom web interface, etc) does not know how to do direct mentions.

They're doing something weird.
@taoeffect @ntnsndr I could write an MRF to fix this, so incoming activities with no mentions but are a reply automatically fill this in to compensate. In practice this hasn't been a common issue, though.

Could it be that my @openvibe client is not using mentions properly in replies?

@feld @ntnsndr Nathan do you have any idea whether you're doing something weird? 🧐