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Comment by JuniperMesos

17 hours ago

> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to? By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?

The same mechanism that stops a bank from saying, "sure you can withdraw more than $10,000 from your account and we won't ask any questions about what you plan to do with it" - explicit financial regulation with real penalties attached to it, that banks systematically adhere to. I'm not necessarily a fan of all legal regulations around banks or other financial product providers - this is a huge reason I'm interested in truly decentralized cryptocurrency systems - but given that the regulated fiat financial system does exist and is widely used, we might as well demand that these regulations include provisions that the bank has to let people running free smartphone OSs connect to their systems too.