Comment by lmm
1 year ago
Allowing payroll companies to pull money back is a design choice, not an immutable fact of nature, as is pretending to clear instantly. Other choices are possible. (Obviously not crypto nonsense; RTGS settling in <3 days is boring, mainstream bank plumbing in many countries. You know this)
It is the design choice of the system we have now. The post doesn't claim that it is the only possible design choice. The post doesn't even claim that the banking system was never weaponized for political reasons; it makes clear that has in fact happened. What it is at pains to point out is that the complaints of crypto-magnates about the system being recently weaponized against them are dubious, because their complaints center around longstanding properties of our system that other businesses routinely trip over.
> The post doesn't claim that it is the only possible design choice.
Not explicitly. But it's set up to mislead you into thinking that, by pretending to be a deep dive into the causes of something, while spending great effort on some of the (minor) causes and quickly skating over other, more significant causes that reflect more negatively on the author's industry.
> The post doesn't even claim that the banking system was never weaponized for political reasons; it makes clear that has in fact happened. What it is at pains to point out is that the complaints of crypto-magnates about the system being recently weaponized against them are dubious, because their complaints center around longstanding properties of our system that other businesses routinely trip over.
The post is at pains to make it all sound normal and inevitable and unintentional. Of course when the bank sends a letter saying that its decision is final this is a bald-faced lie, everyone in the banking system knows that sending bald-faced lies to your customers is normal and expected, how deceptive it is of the crypto folks to pretend to believe that the letter they were sent meant what it said. Of course people should be cut off from the financial system and told vague lies and evasions about why, that happens to everyone, why would anyone complain about that?
The post acknowledges that the financial system is set up to secretly cut people off without review or recourse, that this ability is weaponised for political reasons, and then glosses over and misdirects around the fact that this is a deliberate setup that serves that financial system's interests. It may not be malicious targeting of crypto folks in a narrow sense, but it's indistinguishable from it, by design. "Look, it really doesn't matter that our system silently cuts off people who work with our competitors and lies about the reasons, because that's just our system behaving as normal and it does exactly the same thing to bodega owners" is not, once you strip away the flourishes, a compelling defense.
No, it isn't set up to mislead; no, the causes it's discussing aren't "minor" (they've blown up banks), no, the post doesn't write approvingly of US banking practices, referring to them at points as kafkaesque, not, the post doesn't skate over the "lie" that account closure notices aren't final (it spends a whole section on that), and it seems plain what parts of the system crypto companies are running aground against; they're the same parts that bodega cash transfer businesses have run into for decades.
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