Lol, monopoly is more accurate than I thought... They need to make a bitcoin/crypto edition too where bank is non existent in the game, I'm surprised they haven't come up with that yet
Bitcoin won't make banks magically disappear. If Bitcoin succeeds, banks will adopt Bitcoin, and you will use banks.
... banks, central banks in particular, wont magically disappear. They will most likely disappear in spectacular catastrophic collapses, fiatnado firestorms that take large parts of the global economy with them. Or they will disappear with excrutiatingly slow economic stagnation epochs; creating zombie-stumbling, wealth-destroying behemoths roaming the financial landscape preying on anything that looks like growth and suffocating it in command-and-control stymying decline.
Banks in their current incarnation of the modern era only 3-400 years ago came about with the rise of paper money, double-entry book-keeping and credit. Bitcoin's invention of money-as-a-data-type and money-over-internet-protocol makes it hard to overstate the leap ahead these technologies provide versus fiat money, centralised ledgers, fractional reserve custody and command-and-control economic (mis)management through monetary manipulations.
The writing is on the wall for banks, we just don't know what will replace them. A lack of imagination in that regard is no excuse to lazily proclaim that "nothing really changes". It's not unrealistic to expect that now the basic building blocks of money-as-a-data-type and money-over-internet-protocol are demonstrated to the information age, and now being built out to a production ready state, that many of the 'services' of modern financial institutions can be simply replaced by algorithmic tools and machine programmes, i.e. code.
This is a very interesting debate.
There are some semantics involved... What are banks?
Yeah, central banks I guess are those that really do print fiat money (even if by mandate or in according to regulations of their respective governments). Those would be the most affected by wide adoption of Bitcoin, yes.
But then there is "regular" banks. The ones that provide "service" to their clients (business, individuals, etc). Currently most of those don't want to have anything to do with Bitcoin. But I don't think the widespread adoption of BTC would mean they would disappear. And it doesn't matter if it is the same "brands" that we know and hear about every day... even if those would die in a catastrophical financial collapse, other new ones would replace them.
For example, even in current early stage of adoption, we are seeing how many business are being born around BTC that resemble "banks" or at least some of the services of "traditional" banking: Exchanges, ATM providers, custodial providers, margin/loan providers, debit card providers, etc...
In some way we could even call them "banks" right now, in a sense.
What's the difference if it is called "Banco de Santander" vs "Xapo"?
And what stops "Banco de Santander" buying "Xapo" in the future to integrate it in its core if "traditional banking" stops being profitable for them?
The idea of replacing those services by "algorithmic tools and machine programmes" is great but not only we are not there yet but also some of those services would be pretty hard to replace just by that... Unless we are talking about several decades into the future.
And then there is loans/credit. Which is why banks were born in first instance. As long as there is people that do have "excess" and some others that "need to borrow" some of that excess... there will be "banks". Be it FIAT money with its unlimited printing and fractional banking, be it grains... or be it Bitcoin.
Banks in their current incarnation of the modern era only 3-400 years ago came about with the rise of paper money, double-entry book-keeping and credit
Yeah, I can agree that if Bitcoin succeeds surviving banks would probably not fit into that definition anymore. Also there were banks way before the introduction of FIAT money which proves it is not a requisite to their existence. My opinion is that they would just evolve and adapt to the new paradigm, at least the ones surviving.
For me that's not disappearing but just evolving. Also I think we will see traditional banks (not talking about central banks) integrating Bitcoin in some ways during the next few years... way before the FIAT system disappears (as in cease to exist... not just "another" financial crisis).
It's governments who perverted banks with the introduction of FIAT and "economic policies", not the other way around even if nowadays they dance in unison.