Topic: Will Bitcoin do to Bank what email did to the post office? (Read 458 times)

You have a lot of weird presumptions Omahabit, which contributes to my wondering if you have very many clues what bitcoin is, besides what your handlers may have told you to say. 

Both the effect of bitcoin and the banking systems are adapting with the passage of time, and bitcoin's adoption and expansion of its networking effects (as outlined by Trace Mayer) are ongoing with bigger and BIGger and BIGGER players getting into the mix that affects dynamics in a lot of difficult to foresee ways.

Frequently there are questions regarding how much BTC adoption has already taken place, and so it is not easy to know the various ways that bitcoin is being expanded and used beyond your vague category of "investment," and even the concept of investment might refer to who's holding the private keys in that it seems that more than 70% of BTC are held off of exchanges and are not really moving, so if that is what you mean by investment? and at the same time when there is demand for more bitcoin, then that would come from the circulating supply, and surely if the circulating supply is not increasing as much as demand, then the BTC price has to go up to the extent to which some of the supply might be faked, as what happened with the FTX situation and some of the others who were caught not holding as much BTC as they claimed to have had been holding the various cascading crashes through the middle to late 2022 timeframe.

Your assumption of any kind of an ability to change bitcoin from decentralized to centralized also seems weird, and sure there can be attacks upon bitcoin and even attempts to change bitcoin, but I doubt that it is possible to speculate how the supposed battles will play out prior to their being waged.

yes, it is the wet  dream of status quo government folks, financial institutions and perhaps even the status quo rich to believe that they want to get bitcoin under control,  and so they will attempt various kinds of ways to reach such ends of controlling bitcoin, and so far one of the central selling points of the value of bitcoin is that no one can really control it, even if they are going to make attempts to do so, and maybe even claim that they are making progress in that direction.. .. but I will believe that there are successes in controlling bitcoin when I see it...and I am not going to take it for granted.

I do not agree that bitcoin will replace fiat currency because 70 out of 100% of its owners view it as an investment, which may make it impossible for bitcoin to take over the banking system.

Remember, bitcoin is a limited asset. And government owns the banking system and will not allow it to fail as a way to control the flow of money in the economy.

If bitcoin were to become as common as email is to the post office, either the system or its advocates would betray the public and turn bitcoin into a centralised currency rather than a decentralised one. At that point, the government would seize control of the entire system.
For these reasons, I think bitcoin will not do to the bank what email will do to the post office.

It is amazing that anyone who actually knows about bitcoin and who has been a member of this forum for more than 7.5 years would consider bitcoin as NOT having any disruptive impact on the world, and if you think about it, shitcoins exist ONLY because bitcoin is disrupting the whole ways that value can be attached to information in very powerful censorship resistant ways.  Surely an overwhelming majority of shitcoins are crappy imitations of bitcoin with a variety of variations, but bitcoin still sparked their ability to even exist and to imitate bitcoin in various ways to even cause previously unimaginable ways to print money and to scam people in new ways.

Of course, you are not the ONLY bitcoin naysayer in this thread, and I am surprised by the number of senior forum members who downplay bitcoin's importance and already existing impact on the ways of the world... and surely banks are likely going to continue to exist a long time into the future, just like post offices continue to exist right now, and sure maybe banks are going to be able to adapt to bitcoin, but they are likely going to need to adapt to bitcoin, and we already see various kinds of adaptations taking place, and surely there are going to be banks and other third party custodian who might merge in order to help people with their custody solutions, while at the same time, some of the power of bitcoin allows for increased knowledge that there is power to have options and to even keep some value (maybe not all value) outside of the banks so that they have to compete to get your business, and if they cannot win you over, then you are going to take your coins into self-custody... yes.. the power of self-custody is not without complications, but it is a powerful dynamic, and there are already bitcoin-related products in which people have given up their right to self-custody and they are seeking BTC price exposure, so we are going to continue to have dances with the various rug pulls that may well contribute towards the learning and practice of self-custody... which again, these are not all or nothing solutions, because we might keep our bitcoin in various places, but at the same time, we might also learn that if banks (and other third party custodians) are not actually offering sufficient and/or adequate services, and/or if they are overly taking advantage of the possession that they have of our coins, then we may well not want to be allowing them to have our coins, and we will either take some or all of our coins to another custodian or we may well take some or all of our coins into self-custody.


How would you know whether bitcoiners got rid of their banks in the event that they had a bank to begin with?

It seems a bit ridiculous for bitcoiners to completely get rid of banks in their lives, even though I can see why some might do it or believe that it is better and/or easier for them to try to get by without any banks and/or banking accounts..

I doubt that bitcoin services are even close to being sufficiently wide-spread in order for it to really be practical, meaningful and/or more empowering to NOT have any bank and/or banking arrangements.

Sure there are some folks who are unbanked, who could not get a bank account, even if they wanted to.. and sure some of those peeps might be moving into bitcoin and believing that they don't really need any banking services, but still I doubt that those people are representative, even to the extent that there are some people who likely fit into such a category of unbanked from traditional banks but still holding bitcoin.


That might be another story regarding how much money to keep in bitcoin versus in your local fiat versus in some other fiat versus in other assets.  If all of your expenses are payable in bitcoin, then maybe it is easy to just keep everything in bitcoin, but I doubt that very many people are able to have all of their expenses in bitcoin.. That sounds like a rare bird to me.


sure governments are having troubles figuring out ways to control bitcoin, but they might not have any choices regarding various things that happen in the world.  Governments have to adapt, just like banks have to adapt, and so there can be incentives for certain kinds of activities, but the incentives have to be somewhat lined up with what people want and the public good, so sometimes certain institutions will have to adapt to become more in line with the public good.


Sure.  We need to engage in practices to protect our own assets and our value, and surely there are a lot of ways that people have been robbed from over the years, and bitcoin should help to make it more difficult to be robbed in certain kinds of ways, but bitcoin still does not necessarily solve all problems, especially when governments sometimes might be overreaching and/or overbearing in regards to burdens and attacks that they might make against bitcoin.

There's no gain in exaggerating Bitcoin either. Since Bitcoin was present, the payment system in the world has changed slightly. In the past, people only knew fiat money to make transactions, long before the modern era, the barter system became a mainstay for exchanging goods. The advantages that Bitcoin has must be acknowledged and proven true, the speed of transactions makes people start switching to Bitcoin especially for transactions between countries.

The reason why the government finds it difficult to accept the presence of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies is because their circulation is completely unregulated and not guaranteed by the central bank or local authorities. Another reason why the government finds it difficult to accept Bitcoin is because it has the potential to disrupt the country's financial stability due to the high inflation in the value of money due to Bitcoin trends.

Political will never came from just a leader, drastic political change always happened when people demand it. I am skeptical that there will be leader that will jeopardize government/it's own control over currency by using decentralized crypto as the main currency, people should demand for it, I am not saying it should be street demonstration or a riot, just do the legal action or anything, if majority of people not willing to demand for crypto or bitocin to be used as the main currency then no leader would do it.

I think alot of us are already over hyping and over exaggerating this bitcoin  and I think this is one reason the government is finding it difficult  to accept bitcoin  and cryptocurrency  at large and I think we should just relax and enjoy every moment  that we have with bitcoin.
I don't see bitcoin  fading the banks out anytime soon because at the end of the day, we still have to convert our holdings into fiat before we can conveniently spend our money and I think with all this speculation,  we are already mounting alot of pressure on bitcoin and cryptocurrency at large and rather than accepting it might end up been rejected.

If travel alot to other countries, you will know that bitcoin will not do to banks what email did to the post office. It will not happen. OP you need to understand that bitcoin is in no competition with Banks. Some bitcoin enthusiast get overly zealous in their support for bitcoin and throw away logical reasoning for delusion.

In countries where there is high population of older people who can barely modern tech, or in an underdeveloped country where it is easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for the tech to support bitcoin for its payment be available, the banks will still be there. They have been here for a century and they will still be for another century. The physical structure may change but the modus operandi of banks won't and this will not stop bitcoin from thriving.

I used to believe and there goes the tons of comparisons like airbnb, uber and other of those outsource services where in they're all centralize services and later on would replace the traditional ones that they've been built upon.

Speaking of being fast, there will always be the moment of time where the transactions will get stuck due to the high demand and also attack in the network. Like with saw with those BRC20 craze but they're just temporary slow downs.

As the world changes, the adoption of Bitcoin is being widened and broadened. I think that we'll still see the existence of banks while Bitcoin will co-exist with it as the banks are backed by government. While us, we do back Bitcoin. 

And many didn't know that its actually a currency since first thing came out on their mind is they can earn profit if they hold bitcoin for long time. The essence for it to use on p2p transaction has been eliminated since to many new people acquire this for investment purposes.

In addition that's why for now we can't really say that it can replace the banking system since this is regulated by government and handled by influential people on society and if they see a big threat of their existence then provably they will do anything to block its existence on their jurisdictions

what might happen is that governments create their own crypto fiat. or create their own digital money with government management. the use of other currencies besides fiat is of course regulated by the regulations of each country. it is not impossible that it can be revised, but it is clear that something that is detrimental to the state will be difficult to materialize.
Such a thing can happen if there is revolutionary thinking from the country's leadership itself. who dare to change and give good breakthroughs to the developing financial system in their country.

That's what the blockchain community hope, and for me I also wish that could happened, but I don't think it will be in our lifetime. And maybe not this Bitcoin that we currently have right now. People should finally realize that blockchain system is better then current Banking and currency system, and when that happened people would demand a revolution for decentralized currency system that is uncontrolled by government, but again I doubt we will witness that in our lifetime.

That makes sense. At first sight one could think that replacing the payment system is the most important, but then we should agree that a bank on blockchain would be a reasonable solution, and I don't think many colleagues here would like it. On the other hand, if we focus on the peer-to-peer currency, then yes, Bitcoin is not only the technology, but the ideology also.

For faster (and smaller) transactions, one can always use Lightning Network with Bitcoin, instead of other centralised services that may seem more convenient (from their point of view, of course).

We have to let time speak for itself, there's going to be that period whereby some will be left without a choice than to embrace bitcoin adoption, for now many that have realized about this change are doing well with the use of bitcoin while those without are not knowing what they are missing already, but when fiat system and centralization pushed them to tip, they will then begin to think of having an alternative, bitcoin not not need to loud itself for people to know it's relevance, tge needs in demand will do the rest for its adoption.

This phrase is one of the best words to shut people back then who don't believe in the crusade of bitcoin, if people could see the transformation of Email in how they revolutionized the way of conveying letters from senders to receivers, then Bitcoin has a future to change the financial institution but deep down, there are limitation to what bitcoin can do, I hope you do see how the price fell from $29k to $24k within 4 hours of yesterday, volatility is the primary concerns here, not to talk of the transaction speed.

However, I'm happy that financial institutions now recognized bitcoin in their portfolio, and the increase in adoption has been great adoption for bitcoin, it may not really change/transform bitcoin the way banks works because the ways of bitcoin is just different from the ways of the banks.

What Email did to the post office is already happening to bitcoin and banks, but it’s a different case. I notice that most people who know about bitcoin don’t really keep their money in banks any longer; they prefer leaving their money in bitcoin rather than somewhere where there won’t be any increase in it. But we all know that the government is against bitcoin and they are in support of banks, so they will never allow bitcoin to replace banks. I know the government will do everything possible to stop that from happening. But with time people will start reducing the amount they leave in their bank accounts and increase the amount they keep in bitcoin.

Bitcoin is 14 years old now. In their first 14 years other inventions have achieved huge adoption and disrupted their sphere. You just can't say the same about Bitcoin. It's mainly used for speculative trading. People don't use it as money for a variety of reasons. One of them being transaction speed, because 10 minutes is not good enough for small physical purchases. Meanwhile banks these days have instant transactions through Visa and Mastercard.

If Bitcoin were to achieve widespread acceptance worldwide, what you said could be really possible. However, at the moment it's really early to say that Bitcoin will have the same impact on banks as emails did on postal services. Post offices are still in need atm and heavily used by many people. I mean emails leverage the internet, eliminating the need to physically mail letters unless when you need to send original documents.

Regarding Bitcoin and banks, it's really hard to predict the complete disappearance of banks if Bitcoin were to replace all global currencies and gain a huge usage. I think banks would be really in use but people might increasingly adopt and use bitcoin or crypto in general in the future, that's just my guess.

It took hundreds of years for emails to make the post office old-fashioned. Bitcoin is popular mainly in the developed world and among the educated population. Many people in the world have zero knowledge about bitcoin, so it will take hundreds of years for Bitcoin to be generally accepted like bank-issued fiats. It took the banks some centuries to displace traditional financial systems. It might also take Bitcoin the same or more time to penetrate every part of the world. It will continue to be an alternative to fiat until it becomes the dominant currency.

I don't think the government will watch bitcoin become uncontrollable in their territory and do nothing. They will always introduce regulatory laws to curtail the excesses of Bitcoin. Some nations are introducing CBDCs, regulating exchanges, and even banning Bitcoin all in a bid to control the currency. Every knowledgeable individual knows that decentralization outshines centralization but because the government benefits more from the latter, they will do everything within their power to resist it.

Unlike what we saw with email and the post office,I honestly  think the benefits did outweigh what would happen to the post office and we moved on, though these are still in business as they have evolved with time to be more efficient!
As for Bitcoin and fiat , these are actually not far apart... I know how much we want Bitcoin to succed but the fiat system is one robust one that can't be broken just yet, besides they say if it ain't broke don't fix it and fiat imo has no problem..though Bitcoin can compliment our local currencies to help make trade much cheaper with the super low transactions and these benefits will trickle down to everything and we shall enjoy cheaper goods and services.

This is absolutely right and that’s why bitcoin stands out from the banking system we have been using all along. Bitcoin is gaining wide adoption and acceptance which will undoubtedly bring fear to the government of the likelihood of it  overthrowing the financial banking system they’re use to and have control over. Government have the total control of power in a country and as such, they will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening. Amidst that, bitcoin wide acceptance won’t stop and people will continue to embrace it. It was formally introduced to serve as an alternative to fiat currency not to eliminate the use of fiat.