Introduction
Usually, we call it the traditional financial system, its job is to facilitate all kinds of financial transactions in an economy, for a long time there was no alternative for this system and this is what helped strengthen his arrogance.
The traditional financial system is composed of central and commercial banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies, financial intermediaries along with other financial institutions and all these entities work under the umbrella of the governments in a centralized old-fashioned framework.
Despite all the negative points that run in this system but it’s highly regulated and covered with all the necessary legal façade and that is not all since what really helped this system to reach this level of arrogance was the silence or inability of community members to use their most powerful weapon in standing against the injustice, the voice.
Why I am calling this system arrogance?
The easy answer is because of an incident that happened to me 3 years ago.
3 years ago the biggest financial and economic crises in the history of Lebanon took place which it’s still storming until now.
The people's savings are stuck in the banks the local currency lost its value against the USD and there’s no other way for people to live in a decent way with more than 80% of Lebanese people living below the poverty line (an article posted by the bank where I work). Here some politicians suggested that the expats send monthly financial aid to their families in Lebanon and other individuals started looking to find other jobs just to get some extra money in order to survive.
Thus, the amount of money entering to the country increased, and here the decision maker based on their central system represented by the banks issued what is called the fresh money account.
So, the depositors need to forget about their savings since now they are old or maybe expired and they have to open a fresh account in USD, so the new money will enter this account, and the bank, the government, and the financial intermediary will take commissions after that the account owner will be able to withdraw the new fresh money from his account.
I don’t know what about you guys but for me this still looks crazy!
As for most of the Lebanese people we do not have any other choice, so we are doing that until this moment, receiving fresh money, and getting them from our accounts after the commissions and fees are deducted.
This can be considered as a kind of financial system arrogance, but this is not all. Because what really happened as I said above an incident that happened personally between me and the bank and it was because of the cryptocurrency.
Here in Lebanon, the crypto community is not that big, but for me, I started on @hive blockchain in its early beginning from here I was introduced to the crypto world and I was able to get some crypto to help me in these bad situations so I started to transfer some of the crypto into my bank account and withdraw them. I thought it was going to be easy for me since I am already a banker.
One day the AML department contacted me and asked me for a meeting and we are in the same building. I went to the AML manager’s office without having any idea why we are having this talk.
Well to be honest the man was really friendly maybe because I know him and we work together for the same institution, then the investigation started after he asked me why you are getting money from crypto platforms.
My first answer was… because of this situation and I’ve been dealing with crypto since 2017 so these are some extra money.
This friendly guy advised me to stop dealing with crypto since it is a scam.
I said some of the projects can be scams but not all of them and we cannot talk about scams here because we are all living in the traditional financial system scam.
Maybe this answer wasn’t the one that he would like to hear so he said that I have to stop transferring money from crypto platforms otherwise my bank account will be closed.
So, the guy’s problem was the lack of knowledge and not knowing how to differentiate between the clean platforms and the dirty ones and for him all cryptocurrencies are dirty and have to be stopped.
At this point, I became sure that this financial system or its controllers of it can have a high degree of stupidity to ban the crypto transfers noting that the incoming money is also considered here in Lebanon as “fresh money”.
Ignorance can really destroy communities.
Conclusion
Many decision-makers and authorities in the traditional financial system still look at cryptocurrency as their enemy so they are fighting cryptocurrency just for being a cryptocurrency, where on a matter of fact this new technology can really give a big help in saving the old system by handling different sides and helping all community members like companies and individuals in facilitating their financial transactions.
Keeping on the old mentality will only hurt this broken system that needs a radical overhaul.