[BoppreH]

The fees come from fulfilling legal requirements like detection of money laundering and terrorism financing, and also customer security features like fraud detection and multi-factor authentication.

There are fintechs for customers who want lower fees and don't need e.g. physical branches or phone support. That's perfectly fine.

But a fintech that didn't perform KYC would be shut down pretty quickly by the police, so there's a floor on how low fees can be while remaining legal.

[toenail]

Congrats, you went from it's not legal, to it's irrational, to it's more competitive because of government regulation, you've made progress.

[BoppreH]

> more competitive because of government regulation

That's the same as "not legal".

But I agree that it's still a useful technology, because the moral argument sometimes trumps the legal one. If a north korean defector uses Bitcoin to exfiltrate their life savings, I don't think anybody will complain how it was technically illegal under North Korea's law.