One of the most dangerous myths about Bitcoin isn't that it's a scam or a bubble. It's the patronizing narrative that Bitcoin will "bank the unbanked", as if banking itself were some great achievement worth aspiring to, as if the developing world should be grateful to finally receive the shackles the West has been wearing for decades.
Let's be brutally clear, Bitcoin was never designed to bank the unbanked. It was designed to unbank the banked.
## The Fraud We Call Banking
Modern banking is not a system of safekeeping. It is not a neutral intermediary. It is a legalized violation of property rights.
Banking is a state-privileged cartel. Fractional reserve banking, central banking, and legal tender laws did not emerge from free markets. They were imposed, layer by layer, to protect banks from the consequences of insolvency and fraud. What we call "the financial system" is not a spontaneous order, but it's a managed illusion.
Bitcoin reintroduced a concept that modern finance has trained us to forget, which is final settlement without permission.
The tragedy of the "banking the unbanked" narrative is that it accepts the moral legitimacy of banks as gatekeepers. It assumes exclusion is the problem, rather than the existence of the gate itself. Bitcoin does not aim to give the unbanked access to credit cards, overdraft fees, inflation, and surveillance. It offers something far more radical: the ability to opt out entirely.
## The Con You Finance
Here's what your bank actually does with your "deposit": nothing resembling a deposit at all. When you hand over your money, you're making an unsecured loan to an institution that will use your property to create new money out of thin air. The money is no longer yours in any meaningful sense. It becomes the bank's property, to be rehypothecated, lent out, and multiplied through credit expansion.
But it gets worse. Having received your unsecured loan (which you still naively call a "deposit"), banks now charge you fees for the privilege of lending them your money. Maintenance fees. Transaction fees. Withdrawal fees. They've monetized your own property against you. An unsecured creditor paying the debtor. In any other context, this would be prosecuted as fraud.
When a borrower seeks a loan, the bank doesn't lend existing money, it creates new money by the very act of lending. This newly conjured money enters circulation, and the borrower pays interest on funds that existed nowhere until the moment he asked to borrow them.
The fraud keeps compounding. As this newly created money enters the economy, asset prices rise. Others borrow against increased values. Each loan creates more deposits, more money, driving prices higher. The multiplier effect turns your deposit into a cascade of monetary expansion that enriches banks while impoverishing everyone who must buy goods and services with perpetually debased currency.
Tell me again what the unbanked are missing.
## The Prison You Pay For
Want to withdraw your own money? Not so fast. Laws like the Bank Secrecy Act impose arbitrary limits (typically $10,000) beyond which you become suspect. Never mind that the bank has surveilled every transaction for years. Never mind that this is your property, earned through your labour. Withdraw too much of your own money, and suddenly you're subject to interrogation, investigation, potential prosecution.
Your account can be frozen at a bureaucrat's whim, your funds seized before any wrongdoing is proven. You're told whom you may transact with and whom you may not, which regions are permitted and which forbidden. This is financial serfdom, and you're paying fees for these chains.
The question is not how Bitcoin can help banks reach more people. The question is whether enough people, especially the well-banked, can escape the monetary imagination prison they were educated into and recognize that a system requiring constant bailouts, inflation, and coercion is not a feature of civilization but a historical abomination.
## The Addiction That Enslaves
Banking wouldn't survive a day without its partner in crime: the government's monopoly on money creation. Together, they've built a system that keeps you dependent, compliant, addicted.
The addiction is to credit; that magical substance banks dispense like confetti. Houses, cars, businesses, education: everything has been made so artificially expensive through monetary expansion that purchasing anything significant without credit has become nearly impossible.
Credit is control. Debt is dominion and inflation; that invisible tax that robs you while you sleep, is the mechanism by which your savings are perpetually transferred to those with first access to newly created money.
## Bitcoin: The Categorical Rejection
Bitcoin is not an improvement on banking. It is the categorical rejection of everything banking represents.
Bitcoin eliminates the need for trusted intermediaries and the counterparty risk they bring. You control your private keys, you control your Bitcoin. No bank can freeze your account. No government can seize your funds without physically compelling you to surrender your keys. The protocol itself enforces your property rights.
The unbanked intuitively understand self-custody and finality because they already live outside institutional trust. The banked; the salaried professional, the asset manager, the policy analyst, have been trained through education, law, and habit to believe that money requires managers, risk committees, and central planners. To them, self-custody sounds reckless. Their dependence is not technical; it is psychological.
Bitcoin replicates the useful functions people mistakenly attribute to banks such as payments, savings, settlement; without reproducing the usury, opacity, and coercion that define them. It allows individuals to hold property outright, not as a revocable privilege granted by a financial intermediary.
The question "who will bank the unbanked?" assumes people need banks. In a world where Bitcoin exists, they do not. They need money that holds its value, a medium of exchange that cannot be debased, a store of wealth that doesn't require trusting institutions whose business model is legalized fraud.
Bitcoin provides this, not by creating a better banking system, but by making banking unnecessary.
## The Real Mission
The real question is not how to include more people in a fraudulent system. The real question is how to free those already trapped within it.
Why would anyone entrust their life savings to institutions that create money from nothing, charge interest on the creation, expand the money supply to debase all existing holdings, gamble with deposits, pay themselves bonuses regardless of outcomes, and enjoy legal protection from any challenge to their fraud?
The phrase "banking the unbanked" reveals a poverty of imagination and a dangerous assumption that the banked are somehow privileged. The banked aren't privileged. They're captured. They're subjects of a permissioned financial system that treats their property as collateral for an infinite Ponzi scheme.
The "unbanked" who choose Bitcoin aren't missing out on financial inclusion. They're avoiding financial imprisonment.
## Breaking the Chains
The question of banking the unbanked accepts a false premise: that banking, as currently constituted, is a service rather than parasitic extraction. It assumes being banked is desirable, that the unbanked are missing something valuable, that the solution is extending the reach of institutions that systematically defraud their customers.
What are the unbanked actually missing? The privilege of having loans created in their name from nothing while paying interest on the creation? The convenience of watching their purchasing power erode through inflation created by the very banks holding their funds? The opportunity to participate in multiplier fraud that enriches financiers while impoverishing depositors?
Bitcoin's mission was never to extend banking's reach to those who've escaped it. Bitcoin's mission is to liberate those already enslaved by it; to break the chains that bind billions to a system built on legalized theft, to free humanity from dependence on institutions that systematically violate the most fundamental property rights.
The revolution isn't about access to banks. It's about emancipation from them.
The hardest chains to break aren't made of steel. They're made of comfortable assumptions, of normalized theft, of the belief that surveillance equals security and dependence equals sophistication. Bitcoin breaks those chains, but only for those ready to see them.
