Why I’m Giving Governments and Banks the Middle Finger

Written by ChrisHerd | Published 2018/08/08
Tech Story Tags: fintech | life | startup | finance | money

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Banks F**king Suck

How does enabling them to take massive gambles with our money for s**t rewards even work? You deposit £/$10 which allows them to “invest” £/$100 and keep all but a tiny fraction of the profit. 1% interest rates? They are literally presiding over us becoming poorer while they get richer.

And our data?

Banks know more about us than anyone apart from Google and Facebook, yet they do nothing with that intelligence. They could use it to build the most transparent comparison engine in history, telling its customers when they are paying more than others but they don’t because they are in bed with the £/$Billion companies extorting us. F**k that.

Think about what a financial wallet as a platform could mean for us all. Banks have hundreds of thousands of customers who, if they acted together, could harness tremendous power and influence. Imagine group purchasing on an industrial, national then global scale. All we require is technology which enables that collaboration. We have it in smartphones and the internet.

What I’m talking about is Uber and Airbnb where anyone who participates earns a fraction of ownership each time they do. It requires boycotting consumer brands in favour of creating our own, which is far easier than it sounds. Imagine Uber where you earned the same hourly rate but at the same time received UberCoin for each journey which increased your ownership of the company. Now transplant that across every consumer purchase you make — beer, coca cola, milk, holidays, literally everything. That is what technology can enable. No more multi-national corporations wasting $Billions of our money on marketing.

Buy the products that benefit you — that you own which enrich you.

Governments have written laws which stop you becoming richer

Heard of accredited/sophisticated investor laws? They literally ban you from investing in asset classes reserved for the richest 1%. Don’t have £/$250,000 in the bank? You can’t become richer.

I’ve had enough

What’s needed is banking for punks. That provides everything you need, but is more than you’d ever expect — without actually being one.

A platform where anarchists, renegades and punks can build something new for our benefit, working for us. Banks exist as they do only because it is the way they have always been. Time to burn them to the ground and replace all the rules and expectation which suppress us.

  • There’s no reason the interest rate system is the way it is Except we willingly accept it

  • There’s no reason a bank doesn’t reflect all data to help us save moneyExcept we don’t expect them to

  • There’s no reason we can’t influence the success of business we invest inExcept we don’t have a way to

Let’s create a system which rewards you based on your contribution

A data product can emerge which automatically negotiates your costs down to the lowest price possible without you having to do a thing. The platform can enable 100,000 people to demand a supermarket stocks a product we are invested in.

That is the future

We need to realise how much power we have. Where things are broken or don’t work for us we can obliterate them. When we are being exploited we can stand up and revolt against those who exploit and oppress us. Why do we need to accept the world we exist in as being fixed? It isn’t.

Everything that exists was created by someone no smarter than you. Each of us has the power to create our own things for other people to use. Where we act together we can create things which are orders of magnitude better than what currently exists.

We are responsible for our own fate.

Help me build it.


Published by HackerNoon on 2018/08/08