[srean]

> Banks may be greedy but in exchange for their greed they protect my money

...provided tax payers bail them out, at least that has been so in the recent past. So banks dont really protect your money.

There indeed existed regulatory separation and barrier between the risky side and the non risky side. A client of a bank could choose which side to be on. But bankers thought this was too much of an imposition on their creativity. It still would have been fine if the removal of the barrier was not forced on other banks and countries, which I hear they were.

[rodrodrod]

Most (all?) banks in the US are FDIC insured up to $250k per person. Even if tax payer money hadn't been lent to banks to keep them afloat, provided you had less than $250k across any banks that might've gone under, you'd have been okay. In that sense, saying that they don't really protect your money isn't really true.

Realistically, I'm much much much more likely to lose money stored in a Bitcoin wallet I maintain than money stored in a bank, and I'd imagine that's probably also the case for most people.

[srean]

> Realistically, I'm much much much more likely to lose money stored in a Bitcoin wallet

Oh absolutely. What I was commenting on is that the source of this protection is not the bank alone, but the expectation that someone will pull it through if it went bust.

[DrTarantism]

I live in Australia so we do have greater protections and safer banks than in America. But regardless, those tax payer bail outs are still part of the banking system. The banking system is more than the actual banks themselves, it includes the legal and political climate such as bail outs. You can't compare Bitcoin and Banks without looking at the full picture, otherwise that is just a distortion of reality.

[lmm]

> ...provided tax payers bail them out, at least that has been so in the recent past. So banks dont really protect your money.

In some theoretical sense, sure. On a practical level, I pay my taxes either way, in the banking system my money is insured, in the bitcoin system my money isn't insured.