[aazaa]

> Some banks have already begun dabbling in these areas without regulatory clarity. Earlier this month, U.S. Bancorp (USB.N) announced it was launching a cryptocurrency custody service for institutional investment managers.

This is fascinating. Within a mere 10 years, Bitcoin has gone from a toy to something now intersecting directly with the US banking system.

With each integration point, Bitcoin gets more difficult to legislate out of existence or destroy through capricious police action. Aside from Tether, this is one of the biggest risk factors cited by those who have studied Bitcoin in detail.

[mywittyname]

The fear that governments were going to take down bitcoin was always overblown. It has a basis in the libertarian idea that governments hate & destroy all good things, and bitcoin is a good thing, thus the government will hate & destroy it. Regulators were skeptical at first, but that quickly gave way to accommodation.

But this is what success always looked like for bitcoin. Most people want the ability to assign custodians to their assets; they want people to be able to identify their assets from other peoples' assets; they don't care about the ability to bury digital treasure somewhere. And importantly, most people invest with an eye on ROI, not for some philosophical purpose.

Bitcoin is mainstream, and has been for a while. And now the mainstream buyers are want mainstream financial management structures which are opposed to the views of the people who bought btc before it was cool.

[jimbob45]

BTC is mainstream in all the ways that don’t matter. Fundamentally, it doesn’t work for everyday transactions. The only transactions for BTC now are through exchanges where the exchange never actually passes “physical” ownership to the bankee. That’s antithetical to the whole point of BTC.

BTC now is just mass FOMO over not coming in to the Ponzi scheme early enough to still make money.