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Comment by nly | Hacker News Reader

Americans aren't used banking systems that work.

Strangely, Americans also live in a country where the police can just steal your cash without charging you with a crime. They call it forfeiture.

Honestly, I feel like so much of the crypto space is due to that. Even in Brazil we have a pretty simple inter-bank transfer system used by virtually everybody. You just have to know an email or a phone.

Americans don’t use such large sums of cash in transactions very frequently, do others?

The only large exception I am aware of is dispensaries because banks don’t want potential drug money laundering charges.

A significant portion of the US population uses cash for everything. Only about 2/3 of Americans use traditional banks for their finances. Most of them are poor, so they're not making many transactions over 10k, but those people will pay for cars, rent, etc in cash.

Neither them nor Europeans are used to less benign governments.

And the problem with good governments (and fair elections and other properties of decent democracies) is that they can accidentally let bad actors in (populism is one helluva drug for the masses), and bad actors may attempt to undermine the institutions, turning democracies into kleptocracies and dictatorships if they succeed.

Then all those safeguards in the name of all that's good become perfect tools for abuse in the name of all the control over whoever dares to oppose the established order.

> Neither them nor Europeans are used to less benign governments.

I'm pretty sure Europeans have heard of Hitler and Stalin and their ilk.

I feel like we have decent banking here…?

Isn't it dangerous to give out your bank account number in the US, people can withdraw from it if they know it or something?

You'd also need the routing number for the bank as well as the name on the account, at a minimum. And what you're thinking of is ACH, which goes between institutions, not between individuals.

The routing and account numbers are on all paper checks you write. You can use them to set up ACH transfers to/from that account, with pretty minimal checks.

Those transfers have to go through heavily regulated institutions, however, all of whom have strict KYC laws. Of all the ways to try and steal someone's money, this would be fairly low on my list.

USA doesn't even have a standard way of normal humans transferring money electronically to each other, leading to a plethora of competing apps that try to solve this.

There are upsides and downsides. Having an additional degree of separation is nice when I'm doing transactions with strangers. I prefer to use Venmo instead of Zelle for precisely that reason.

The US has a couple of ways that normal humans can transfer money electronically to each other. But they're old school (and require bank accounts) and that's why there are newer systems that people use instead.

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