[exelius]

Actually, you already get dividend payments on a continual basis. The future expected dividend payout of a stock is built in to the price of the stock on a continuous basis. Sure, you have to sign up for a brokerage account, but do you think the SEC is really going to let people buy and trade stock anonymously? You're going to have to sign up for some sort of financially verified account even if Bitcoin is powering the transaction system. There will be money laundering laws that will require an institution to verify your identity and credit history (likely by signing your transaction, and by SEC/treasury rules that stock transactions are only legally binding if signed by a licensed identity verification service). The banks and government will never give up the control they have today, and there are ways of introducing such control into a blockchain-style system.

The parts of the financial services industry that can be automated are already automated. Financial services drives the bleeding edge of the technology industry - online banking has been a thing even before the Internet (you used to get a program on floppy from your bank and dial in to their systems through a modem). BTC (or rather, the blockchain) does have the capability to reduce the cost of this automation, but it's already highly automated.

That 8% of GDP in financial services? It's all salesmanship. In order to give someone a loan, you have to be able to sell that loan to an investor. The lower the rate you can convince your investors to take, the more margin you get to keep. Why does Goldman Sachs charge more to issue an IPO than other investment banks? Is it because they're better at filing SEC paperwork? No, it's because they can sell the IPO better by convincing investors of the growth potential of the company (the majority of IPOs are funded through large direct sales to institutional investors). I never said it was fair, but I don't know that you can ever get rid of it entirely either (the US financial services industry also serves most of the rest of the world, which is why it's so much larger than in other countries).

But bottom line, most people are not educated enough in finance to handle this stuff themselves without getting completely ripped off. That fact alone will support a very large, regulated financial services industry. That also precludes the utopian vision of many Bitcoin devotees - unless Grandma Nelly who works as a greeter at Wal-Mart can understand finance, you're always going to have intermediaries. Because those intermediaries aren't to be trusted, they will need to be regulated by the government. It doesn't matter what the transaction system is, people need to be able to trust the economy without knowing a whole lot about how it works.