Why I buy Bitcoin

Like most people reading this, I buy/hold cryptocurrency — but I still use a bank. Ever since I was a child I have been a customer of The Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

The Commonwealth Bank is one of what’s known in Australia as “The Big 4 Banks”. The moniker is well deserved because it is has operated for over a century, it netted over 26 billion AUD just last year alone, it runs over 1100 brick and mortar branches and employs over 50 000 people.

Last week this financial behemoth ground to a halt for most of the working day on Monday — it’s online banking platform was completely inaccessible to it’s 15.9 million customers. Additionally all their merchant terminals failed to process Visa and Mastercard transactions at the point of sale. Hundreds of thousands of people were unable to pay their rent, buy groceries, pay for their breakfast and move money to desired investments or accounts. Similarly, merchants expecting payment for goods and services simply were denied their funds. A similar thing happened in April, earlier this year.

It just so happened that about 24 hours before this crash I had made a deposit from my Commonwealth Bank account to my chosen crypto exchange here in Australia via a new banking payment layer, OSKO, which boasts settlement times of less than a minute. I’ve used OSKO before and can confirm they are quick. However the Commonwealth bank decided to put a hold on my deposit for “security concerns” and told me that my deposit should be processed within 24 hours. 

Before I go any further, I should just mention the absurdity of this particular bank putting a hold on my tiny transfer for “security reasons”. It is absurd for a few reasons. Recently in Australia we have been witnessing a long-overdue Royal Commission into the banking sector, through which The Commonwealth Bank has been exposed as one of the most corrupt and deceitful institutions in the country. They were found to be the leading perpetrator of issuing what has become known as ‘fees-for-no-service”; secretly charging customers exorbitant fees for products they did not receive or even ask for. The extent of this insanity went as far as systematically charging dead people for phantom services long after they had passed away. Completely tangential to this was the coming to light of a major security breachat the hands of the Commonwealth Bank that compromised the personal details of 20 million accounts.

So to be stopped from using my money to purchase a decentralised, trustless, reliable, never-compromised medium of exchange, for “security reasons”, by objectively the largest financial fuck-up in the country is ludacris.

The insanity of this is that through fractional-reserve banking, my bank — who has locked 15 million people out from day to day transacting, charged dead people fees for services they never received and compromised the data of 20 million people — can invest the money I trust it with many times over. So that deposit I was attempting to make to a crypto exchange can be used 2, 3, 4, up for 9 times over and invested in many different ways to maximise their profits while I wait for “permission” to spend it how I want. Oh, and of course I then pay a small fee for the privilege as we steamroll our way to another financial collapse.

It took 48 hours for my my “instant” OSKO deposit to land in my crypto exchange. But good thing the noble Commonwealth Bank did their “security check”. I am one of the lucky ones on this planet. I wasn’t dependant on access to my funds for important healthcare, food or shelter. There are millions of people who don’t have access to important financial services and some of those people will need 100% reliable systems in place to ensure their child survives, their business remains viable or their land is not taken from them. 

The only security check the banks need to be doing is the one that investigates their viability moving into the future. If they can’t be trusted to provide transparent, responsible and timely financial services to the everyday public then their days are numbered.

Unfortunately, we still live in a world where a bank is a necessity. The beauty of the blockchain is that there is a world coming where we can be our own banks. This is why I take money out of the hands of the institutions that single-handedly caused the global financial crisis in 2008 and put it into a robust, secure, fixed digital asset that no government, no backwards cabal of bankers can touch.

 

Written by: Glen Veitch - CRYPTO 101 Blogger