How are the banks corrupting Bitcoin?

[Light]

They can't corrupt bitcoin, unless they have capital to manipulate bitcoin price, take down all miners & polls or have more than 50% of bitcoin network hashrate.
I think banks will work together to make their own centralized cryptocurrency & convince people to use their cryptocurrency and forget bitcoin.

They could make it an extreme pain in the arse to use it which would hurt Bitcoin in the extreme. Given that literally every person I've seen only cares about the price relative to fiat - if the banks all agreed to close every persons account who they tied with Bitcoin transactions (which is perfectly acceptable under their TOS) then you'd have no way to get fiat (outside of raw cash transactions). Not very many people are willing to deal in raw face to face transactions (especially with the personal security risks) and thus Bitcoin would be rather hard to use given that you have no way to spend it (as no one accepts Bitcoin as Bitcoin - everyone denominates it as fiat - much like a commodity).

[maokoto]

I think Banks have the power to do much. For example, buying large amounts of Bitcoin with their clients' deposits and then selling to create volatility and lack of trust in BTC while getting some profit all the while. They can join also and complaint to governments. They can scare their clients of Bitcoin being not trustworthy...

To sum up. I think that they can do a lot to harm Bitcoin, and perhaps they are not harming it yet because they do not consider it a real threat.

[Light]

People can just make new accounts in other banks & won't tied their account with bitcoin activity. Also, there are many ways to earn/nuy bitcoin without bank.
So, that won't reduce bitcoin adoption much.

If all of the banks agree - and share data (which they already do in most countries) then you'll be hard pressed to continually open accounts. I'm not saying it's impossible to attain or spend Bitcoin without a bank intermediary - I'm saying that it's such an inconvenience to do so that a majority of people will not bother. Of course there are hardcore adopters who might be happy to do so - but you can be pretty darn sure that if it's a ton of additional effort a majority of laypeople will not adopt. There is already enough difficulty in explaining Bitcoin's workings, how to secure coins, how to acquire them etc. that more problems aren't going to help Bitcoin at all.

But this is all in theory - the reality is that the banks won't do much unless they feel threatened - and they're not threatened enough yet to accept the losses that come with turned away business.

[Kakmakr]

I think the best example was the collaboration between the banks in Australia, where they closed business accounts linked to Bitcoin. They have since been taken to court for anti-competitive practices. They can repeat this kind of behavior, in countries where citizens are not protected against that type of actions.

It is still necessary to convert to fiat, and they know it. In future as more merchants accept bitcoin, things might change, and we would not need a account with them. They can accept it and work with us, or we will increase our efforts to take them out of the circle, like they did with the millions of unbanked people in this world.

[jbreher]

Gavin can change the code at any time. Isn't that one person with way too much power over the project?

I'm surprised to hear this from you. Gavin can change_some_ code at any time. He is powerless to change any code that anyone else is running. Hell, he can't even make changes to Bitcoin Core without the approval of the gatekeeper he put in place when he gave up the helm.

[Herbert2020]

u cannot stop an idea who's time has come,

its a skynet bred self reinforcing self protecting

system, a digital system born out of an analogous

world, u have to say we have become the digital

heart of the world and we now have complete

control of the analogous parts

Gavin can change the code at any time. Isn't that one person with way too much power over the project?

what?!!
he has already changed the code once (bitcoin xt) and failed.
and no matter how much more he or anybody else changes bitcoin code, as long as there are other people using bitcoin (all the users, services, miners, other developers, etc) it will fail again if it is not useful, and they don't agree upon it.