My bankers told me, I need to help them to create an bitcoin wallet and hand it to them, and they’re too busy to learn it and it’s very difficult to use, they don’t believe cash would die, they deal with thousands of clients everyday who need bankers to create banking account for them, and they know a lot of people, despite having a smart phone, are not good enough to use the phone for simple online banking, they are only good enough to make phone calls with a smart phone, they don’t even know how to send texts to friends, they don’t believe their clients are capable to create their own bitcoin wallet and use it as cash, their clients would always come to them for help with their banking problem, and bitcoin didn’t provide any help as friendly as banker, it’s why it would fail to gain their attention. And more shockingly, they’re talking about their clients as young as 20-30s, they’re not gonna learn to use bitcoin, only a handful of very young people are tech savvy enough to use smartphone to their fullest, the rest of them are just like our grandma dealing with smartphone.
I don't have banker friends, but the acquaintances I knew of were very much entrenched in the "traditional" banking and finance systems. I actually only know them because of my recent (is 2016 still recent) living and working circumstances but they're accountants, tax experts, financial compliance specialists... so to speak.
The difference with them was: willing to spend a lot of time learning about Bitcoin. But other than that, same sort of responses like your banker friends:
- they prefer custodial services. They can't be arsed to learn to use a Bitcoin client. Using it is a fantasy for nerds.
- they don't think cash will die. Bitcoin will be big, but they see it (or saw it hahaha) as a cash cow.
- they also sell on Bitcoin to clients, but in fact manage accounts for clients. They and they clients have never actually used Bitcoin, signed anything, broadcast a tx, nothing. They never intend to.
- Because Ripple will be the thing everyone uses, not Bitcoin, which will get replaced.
But you're not surprised by this I hope? Know the banker, know the responses.
And that's why I think all this institutional interest leading to mainstream adoption is not true.