[2014-12-24] Why the world's banks should stop shunning bitcoin

[zakoliverz]

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102288653

 Around the world, mainstream banks afraid of fines and regulatory controls are shutting out firms that provide bitcoin-related services or even associate with the cryptocurrency.

Any bitcoin business can tell you how hard it is to set up a U.K. bank account. A fully regulated bitcoin fund owned by Jersey-based Global Advisors has claimed that HSBC shut down its account recently. Director Danny Masters told CNBC that the excuse given was that his firm no longer met the "risk reward" profile of the bank and was a "potential money laundering risk."

[Enfield]

Why would banks want to deal with it? Bitcoin doesn't need banks anyway and that's what's good about it. The 'potential money laundering' excuse is laughably ironic coming from HSBC.

[Chef Ramsay]

This lunacy out of hsbc is sheer hubris and is borderline trolling considering the reasoning they gave. They don't make them  anymore corrupt than the likes of these a-holes.

[panju1]

Bitcoin doesn't need banks anyway and that's what's good about it.

Until Bitcoin becomes well established, you do need banks. You have salaries and utility bills to pay, which right now are to be paid in fiat.
Banks are trying to constrain the growth of Bitcoin by constraining the growth of Bitcoin companies.

[XCoinCall]

There is also the resistance to change angle. If a party (in this case the banking system) is presented to change it needs to decide whether to adopt, adapt or ignore as a reaction to that change. For companies, who have to deal with investors, the primary decision tool is whether a choice is economically viable or not. Otherwise said, banks feel they have little incentives to adopt Bitcoin. That might change in the future, but even if they do, big companies can't adapt to change as fast as startups. You have an already established company culture, then you have to deal with company learning, technologies, etc. Another way to look at it is that it would affect some departments a lot.

It's notoriously difficult to get banks on board with new advertising concepts, and so they go on making mistakes like these (http://thefinancialbrand.com/37549/6-mistakes-in-banking-advertisements). If banks don't want to learn and improve on mainstream concepts, how are they to handle Bitcoin?

This doesn't mean they won't, it just means it might take a while.