Comment by ranger207
1 year ago
I don't feel like the article is particularly in favor of or against debanking in general. (I think in fact that his position as stated is that debanking in general is bad unless it's against people he doesn't like, which is a position held by literally everybody.) Rather, it's an examination of why debanking exists in general and why "bank everyone you're allowed to" isn't the dominant strategy, what factors go into influencing politically-driven debanking, and whether or not the current argument made by cryptocurrency advocates that "we are being debanked for political reasons" is true or not. It concludes that while crypto is being debanked (or equivalently but less provocatively, banks are declining to create new relations with them), it's primarily because crypto has historically been bad for banks. This in turn has created a(n arguably political) culture among those who decide who shall be banked or debanked to not service their industry. In other words, crypto isn't being debanked because people morally disagree with them per se, but because crypto is simply extremely risky
tl;dr of the tl;dr: the article is primarily about systems around debanking and only secondarily about whether or not crypto is being debanked (conclusion: it is and it's not necessarily for political reasons)
The main problem with the article is that, while patio is a very knowledgeable and even insightful writer, he has an extremely indirect writing style. It almost feels like a math textbook that describes "here's the properties of this mathematical construct; you can immediately see it has these properties" without explaining the connection to the other mathematical constructs that give it these properties. In his defense though, his writing is a more gradual progression between "here's a thing" and "here's the implications of the thing" than a typical math textbook. But he still doesn't explicitly point out the connections, which means you have to expend a lot of brain power to hold enough things in your head at once to make those connections yourself, which is exhausting. Part of that is because the connections are social connections that are far less clear, defined, and observable than typical STEM systems, and he doesn't want to ever tell you or imply to you anything incorrect. Contrast this to Matt Levine who will gladly tell you how a social system works in a step-by-step list, followed by how the example he's about to write about completely breaks that system
Even his tweets are often indecipherable...
His tweets are always perfectly understandable if you've done the reading.
For some reason many of his stories are long winded ways of saying "if you start a business, many of your customers will be literally mentally retarded or senile."
He recently did one where he linked an Uber driver asking a question on Reddit I thought was totally sensible, and then proceeded to write a long extremely polite explanation of how they were an abject moron from the underclass for having to ask it. I didn't believe him on that one.
(But I can't find it because it was written too indirectly so my first 5 tries at search keywords didn't pull it up.)
> debanking in general is bad unless it's against people he doesn't like, which is a position held by literally everybody
I don't hold this position. Should I?