Quote from: evoorhees on December 10, 2012, 05:18:04 PM

http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/12/10/the-controversy-of-bankhood.html

This seems to be a good article indeed.

About the linux comparison: GNU/Linux do coexist nowadays with MS Operating systems. Pretty much in the literal sense of the expression. Many, many linux newbies started with a so-called double-boot. And there are also plenty of tools that allow a MS user to get accustomed to GNU tools, such as Cygwin. In the other way around, there is Wine. I believe those tools are strategically very important for the success of FOSS, because they provide an easy transition for people who have been educated to work with MS or Apple systems. Without this, the learning curve would probably be much too steep and fewer people would manage to learn GNU/Linux.

I believe it's pretty much the same with the idea of a bicoin-friendy bank. Even people who don't want to use something like that should realize the tremendous amount of people this can bring into bitcoins. Really this can't be bad.

Imagine a very big and famous bank such as Goldman Sachs, Barclay's, BNP-Paribas or whatever started to offer a bitcoin exchange to their customers. Any of their client could, when accessing his online-bank account, convert some of his money into bitcoins and execute bitcoin transactions, for instance in order to retrieve some of his bitcoins into his local wallet, or in order to pay someone using the bitcoin network . Would you consider this a bad thing for the bitcoin project? I would be very surprised if you would.

In other words, imagine the guys from bitcoin-central were not coming from the bitcoin community, but from the banking community. It would be pretty ironic if one way for evil banksters to hurt us, would be to actually join us, wouldn't it?