[...] if Bitcoin isn't a payment system or currency, banks are not behaving anti-competitively.They are simply refusing to do business with a high risk asset, and you have no legal recourse to challenge them.
This would be also true if Bitcoin were to be treated as a foreign currency, for example. To some extend banks can choose which currency they deal with and with which payment system they integrate. Obviously they have to accept the legal tender of their respective countries and follow standards such as SEPA. However nothing would make it obligatory for banks to deal in Bitcoin, even if it were globally legally recognized as a currency. Just like European banks don't have to deal in USD and US banks don't have to deal in EUR.
In Europe, every small business that deals with cryptocurrency is being locked out of finance.
I'm sorry to hear if that's the case in the Netherlands. It definitely isn't the case for every European country. Germany and Austria for example has many companies dealing in crypto, partially well connected to the classical Banking system (eg. the publicy traded Bitcoin Group in Germany), partially well connected to other established infrastructure from the old guard (eg. BitPanda cooperating with the Austrian postal service). Ledger in France and SatoshiLabs in the Czech Republic seem to be flourishing, but to be fair they don't have to deal with finance directly.
Worrying developments in the Netherlands regardless and hopefully not the shape of things to come.
[...] Furthermore, the current environment in the Netherlands is even more frightening. Under Klaas Knot, cash services are being more and more restricted. Now many Dutch businesses have been forced to go debit card only (pin). This forces all consumers to use a bank, since banks decide who you can do business with, this strengthens Klaas Knot's economic authority. None of this was decided democratically. Anti-money laundering policy is being used as a weapon to suppress legal business instead of being used to prevent money laundering. After all, it's the United States that keeps catching Dutch banks in the act of laundering money for cartels and terrorists, not the Netherlands.
The war on cash is definitely a worrying one. To add insult to injury it's being sold as a matter of transparency, security and accountability while none of these values appear to be meaningfully applied to large scale money laundering and tax "optimization".
It is worth noting though that the war on cash appears to come in part from the private (non-finance) sector as well. At least to my understanding there seems to be a trend where some shops and chains in the US don't accept cash anymore and only credit or debit cards. So much for legal tender.
As you see, we the most vulnerable, are the canary in the coal mine. Our duty is to warn the people of the rising toxicity. We do this by testing the legal system and symptomatically exposing corruption and anti-constitutional policies. [...]
I will be keeping an eye on this thread.