It’s not about BofA, CITI, Goldman Sachs, their Billionaire customers, and the Chinese government are likely the largest holders of BTC. It’s about control.
Lets take something that is entirely legal for a moment that you might want to sell, say pornography. If you attempt to sell porn on the internet you will run into all sorts of problems. The banks with close your account, they’re deny you access to the credit card payment processing systems, and so on. We can look first hand at examples of this happening. PornHub had credit cards and bank accounts suspended under the guise that there was child porn. While it’s undoubtedly true that there was almost certainly some amount of ‘child’ porn on the site that is true of any major player in the market and both YouTube and Facebook have substantially more of it than PornHub. Now I’m not looking to get into the porn business, but it’s apparent that government and private interests are targeting pornhub for political reasons and not because of child porn. The people targeting pornhub are part of a religious extremist group. They hate gays and they hate women. They will do whatever it takes to end the distribution of porn.
The government however has also threatened the banks with suspension of charters and the like for doing business with anybody whose ever worked in the porn business. Were you a stripper 25 years ago? Well, many porn stars have had bank accounts shut down in the last 5 years because of a letter that went out to all financial institutions saying that basically banks would have charters suspended if they didn’t cut ties (even with clients of 20+ years in legal businesses) with those connected to “sex trafficking”. Sex trafficking is a term that has basically been extended to mean not people whom were victims of actual crimes, but all persons in the sex business, including the legal sex business.
To conclude even though pornhub has always complied with the law they had credit card processors suspend accounts and could not get setup again because it was not just a credit card processor. It was the intermediary network (Visa/Master Card/etc) who did the cutting off.
Now you might be thinking, ok ok, I don’t care about the sex business. Well, what about wikileaks? It doesn’t end with one issue. It extends to a wide range of groups including political ones.
What cryptocurrencies do is it gives the power of banking back to the people. It makes the government and religious extremists and social extremists and others work harder to take out opponents they don’t like.
When they went after the TheCrypto6.com, ie Ian Freeman, Colleen Fordham, Renee Spinella, Andrew Spinella, and Nobody and Aria DiMezzo they needed 56 agents and an entire day just to seize everything. In other cases involving government all that is required is for the government to send a letter to the financial institution and magically the money is seized. Far far easier than in the case of crypto. In fact I believe they still don’t have access to all the crypto even after these persons were raided. Now sure. You might say they’ll just take a hammer to the hands of these individuals and they’ll cough up the passwords to the crypto. Yes- we know they do those things and yes these people will likely all comply. However- that is still way more effort on the governments part than sending a letter to a third party who controls your dirty fiat. Until it’s taken they also can’t stop you from spending that crypto on things the government and/or others don’t like. Want to gamble that crypto away? Well, it may not be legal, but you can do it thanks to the fact you aren’t reliant on the government to do that transaction. Want to buy porn on the internet despite the governments efforts to suspend bank accounts of those in the ‘sex trafficking’ business? No problem. Just use crypto. Feel like the entertainment cartels are screwing you over freedom wise? Well, nothing says you have to pay a ‘legitimate’ streaming provider. But all sorts of things effectively rely on users having control over their finances and you don’t have that control and freedom to spend your money where you want when you are reliant on banks and financial institutions to conduct business.
