People always criticize banks, especially here in a forum about cryptocurrencies, anarchism, decentralization, etc. (nothing wrong with that basically). But when they read a news saying banks from a country will be able to use BTC on behalf of the customers you're all praising it
There are too much "it's wonderful news" here. I will bookmark this topic and if I see one of you saying in the future 'not your keys not your coins' or don't trust exchanges, and similar adages, I will remember you your double standard and irony.
I know you will keep saying "mass adoption" bla bla bla, which isn't a valid argument. Bitcoin has been doing well without it for a decade.
I perfectly understand your point.
I run a bitcoin full node, I HODL my coins, and I own my private keys.
But not everyone is like me (luckily, might I add).
Not everyone is ready to take the burden of financial sovereignty.
So welcome to more choices in the environment. More choice mean a more diverse audience can get introduced to bitcoin. And this is good.
One thing to remember is in fact, that this another choice adding on top of the others. This is not taking away the possibility to have your coins with you.
Can we think of the central states to ban personal detention of bitcoin (digital gold) like they did in the first place with physical gold? Sure the can (not that mean it will be effective), but this is totally a different story.
Don't worry because I also understand your argument. Do you know what? It's like GNU/Linux, basically, people wanted to create an open-source operating system with open source software, etc. To be free from Microsoft's monopoly, etc
Forks after forks now the things changed. You can find commercial OS like Red Hat or buntu family with for example Google chrome pre-installed and many other softwares that are not so "free", handled by big companies. We could well say for example Ubuntu is not "free" anymore. Canonical owns it and decide
The geeks use OS like Debian & co, the mass use Ubuntu & co
So yeah it gives multiple alternatives to people and yeah it helps the mass adoption. But for ourselves, you, me and everyone here, as early adopters it's funny to read it =)
Apparently not only German banks are starting to think about this kind of services:
Not surprised, ING is located in the Netherlands, Netherlands and Germany is like the same country, they are very cousins lol