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The beginning of the end of the banking ‘mafia’

November 25th, 2021
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Following is an English translation of an article I wrote that was published on SUN earlier today. The original article is in Dutch and you can read it on SUN if you prefer that version.

Several articles have been published in recent months about the problems that people constantly face at local banks. There are also many complaints on social media. Members of parliament even speak of a banking ‘mafia’. By now the problems are well known to everyone: difficulties with opening a bank account, ever changing deposit and withdrawal limits, ever increasing costs including for cash transactions and for savings accounts, denigrating treatment and interrogations when depositing and withdrawing money, extremely long waiting times to get a debit card or Internet-banking, ATMs that are often out of order or empty, and much more.

One of the consequences of this is that people often have little choice but to keep large sums of cash on hand with the risk of getting robbed — which has become a more frequent occurrence lately. Fortunately, all these problems may soon become a thing of the past. An alternative has recently presented itself, namely MobileCoin (MOB).

MobileCoin is a cryptocurrency developed under the technical guidance of cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike, the designer of the communication protocol used in instant-messaging applications such as Signal Private Messenger (‘Signal’), and later implemented by WhatsApp. Where MobileCoin differs from other cryptocurrencies is in its strong focus on privacy, speed and transaction throughput. No one — not even the administrators of the MobileCoin validation-nodes on the network — can see which users are doing transactions with each other and what amounts are being sent. It is also not possible for third parties to be able to find out how many MobileCoins someone has in their account (in their “MobileCoin wallet”). All this exactly as foreseen by the economist Milton Friedman in 1999. 1

The speed with which transactions can be processed makes it possible to make payments within 5 seconds, where with most other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin it can take up to 30 minutes. 2 Furthermore, the processing fee for transactions is also minimal — around 0.0048 USD with the current MOB exchange rate, where with Bitcoin it is often closer to 3 USD. MobileCoin thus enables fast microtransactions. As Joshua Goldbard, CEO of MobileCoin often puts it, MobileCoin makes it possible to pay for a cup of coffee with cryptocurrency.

But the main advantage of MobileCoin is its integration into instant-messaging applications. This integration is already available in Signal on Android and iOS. There is no need to have technical knowledge of cryptocurrencies or to install separate wallet software; sending money in Signal is as simple as sending a chat message to a contact. It is already possible today to send and receive money worldwide through Signal, within seconds, practically for free! So you can imagine that the long lines at money transfer companies like Western Union will soon also be a thing of the past. This further opens the way for e-commerce applications where users can pay for products and services via Signal (similar to WeChat in China, but without the surveillance).

Apart from the fact that the banks can now be circumvented, this will also offer protection to anyone from the criminal government. This is because it becomes extremely difficult for the criminal government to be able to steal what they cannot see. Stealing is not only done through ‘taxation’ but also through inflation/devaluation, 3 which we have experienced several times in the last few years. A lot of people saw the value of their money (especially their savings) reduced by half overnight. Like I mentioned in an previous article, this is part of the current monetary system of enslavement, and it happens on purpose. Money created and managed by the criminal government, anywhere in the world, cannot be trusted. 4

Thanks to technological developments such as MobileCoin, anyone should now be able to protect the value of their money (and savings) and defend it against the banks and the criminal government. Soon, new enhancements will be introduced by MobileCoin that will further enable the easy transition of the entire economy to cryptocurrencies.

Footnotes

  1. See the video below for details.

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  2. Bitcoin has recently introduced the “Lightning Network,” a technological layer above the original blockchain, that allows for faster and cheaper transactions. El Salvador, among others, uses this in their nationwide implementation, but it is cumbersome and does not offer the same privacy (anti-surveillance) guarantees of MobileCoin. ↩︎
  3. As economist J. M. Keynes noted, “[inflation] is the form of taxation which the public finds hardest to evade and even the weakest government can enforce, when it can enforce nothing else” (Keynes, “A Tract on Monetary Reform,” 1923). Inflation is just another way of robbing the individual of the fruits of their labor — slavery, in other words. ↩︎
  4. As economist F. A. Hayek noted, “I don’t believe that we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. We can’t take them violently out of the hands of the government. All we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they cannot stop” (Hayek, 1984). ↩︎

Additional Notes

Meta

This entry was published on Thursday, November 25th, 2021 at 12:39 pm by Karel Donk and is filed under Information Technology Law Personal Politics Software . You can use the permanent link to bookmark and/or share it.

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