Is It Really Your Money?

• Assange Read The Room
• Ueno: What A Bank Deposit Actually Is
• Socialized Losses, Privatized Gains
• What Bitcoin is actually for
• The Lesson Of The Week

In a 2013 blog post titled, “Bitcoin and the dangerous fantasy of ‘apolitical’ money”, former Greece finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis outlined in great detail why apolitical money (i.e. Bitcoin) is incapable of being the foundation of an advanced industrial society. According to Varoufakis;

“The reason that money is and can only be political is that the only way of steering a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of dangerous ponzi growth and stagnation is to exercise a degree of rational, collective control over the supply of money. And since this control is bound to be political, in the sense that different monetary policies will affect different groups of people differently, the only decent manner in which such control can be exercised is through a democratic, collective agency. In brief, while apolitical money is a dangerous illusion, a Central Bank that is democratically controlled (as opposed to the indefensible notion of an ‘independent’ Central Bank) remains our best hope for a form of money that is for the people and by the people. Bitcoin, despite its many interesting features, can never be that.”

There is a rather consequential problem with this reasoning, in that it assumes that the institutions exercising monetary power can be trusted to act in the interests of the people they govern. It also assumes that political accountability is a sufficient safeguard against the abuse of monetary power. The emergence of Bitcoin forced us to confront a fundamental question of whether it made sense for any government, central bank or financial institution should have the unilateral power to determine who gets access to money, what that money is worth and whether someone is permitted to transact with it.

As for Yanis, from what I recall, his position on Bitcoin didn’t change much over the years and remained anchored in the same reasoning that is outlined above. Fast forward thirteen years later, his political organisation, DiEM25, was abruptly debanked. On November 3, 2026, the organisation announced that its Belgian bank account had been closed without warning, leaving tens of thousands of euros inaccessible and threatening its ability to pay salaries, rent and other operating expenses. Of course this was done without warning or explanation, they just woke up one day unable to access their bank account. As is also the norm in such situations, Yanis took to X to appeal for more donations from his supporters so that they could have emergency funds at another bank.

The man who argued that money must remain under democratic political control now finds himself at the mercy of a private financial institution that can effectively interrupt his organisation’s operations without providing a satisfactory explanation. How’s that for irony?

§Assange Read The Room

In December 2010, Wikileaks was in a similar but much worse position, as they were not only debanked by one bank, but by all major financial institutions, including VISA and Mastercard, simultaneously. This financial blockade was designed to cripple and ultimately kill the organization but unlike Yanis, Julian Assange didn’t choose to beg the same system that had violated him for permission to continue transacting. He switched to Bitcoin. Wikileaks’ work continued uninterrupted despite the major setback. The significance of this decision went far beyond accepting an alternative form of payment. Bitcoin provided an alternative financial rail through which supporters could transfer value to an organisation that had been excluded from much of the conventional financial system.

The difference between Varoufakis and Assange; is that one of them was wise enough to understand the brutal nature of the adversary he was up against and one is still naive to think that the solution is another bank account where the exact same thing can be done, over and over again. One organisation responded to financial exclusion by appealing for assistance within the very system that had excluded it. The other recognised that the problem was not merely the absence of a functioning bank account, but the existence of a financial architecture in which access to money could be weaponised.

There are many like Yanis who are yet to understand, that you can’t be an activist or human rights defender where part of your mission involves ideological clashes with the powers that be, while parking your funds in a bank. It’s no different from handing your arch-enemy a loaded gun and trusting them not to use it. There is absolutely no reason at all for being shocked by the banks’ behaviour, as all of this is disclosed in the fine print of the bank account opening form. By all of this, i am referring to the bank’s right to terminate your account, at anytime for any reason. More proof that money in the bank doesn’t belong to you or put differently, “not your, keys not your coins”

§Ueno: What A Bank Deposit Actually Is

The problem extends beyond deliberate debanking. Even people who have never challenged a government, criticised a bank or become involved in politically controversial activities remain exposed to the same underlying vulnerability: counterparty risk. Consider what happened in Paraguay this week.

Ueno Bank, a Paraguay based neo-bank, holding more than $800 million in Paraguayan public deposits and which had grown to be the largest digital lender in the country collapsed overnight four days days ago after the bank’s solvency ratio dropped below 50% of the legally required minimum, amongst many other woes. The bank’s failure also exposed troubling questions surrounding alleged insider lending, regulatory oversight and political connections.

Half the population of the country, woke up one morning unable to access their bank accounts and as the week progressed, this metastasized into riots and ultimately led to the resignation of Central bank president Carlos Carvallo at President Santiago Peña’s request, while the crisis culminated in Peña’s resignation on November 5 amid mounting impeachment pressure. This was not merely a banking inconvenience. It was a systemic failure that demonstrated how the collapse of a single financial institution can rapidly spill over into the wider economy and political system

§Socialized Losses, Privatized Gains

The central bank said it was working to transfer ueno customer accounts to other banks, a process that has caused friction in the banking system and contributed to outages ​at several banking apps. Customers still can’t access their ueno accounts and some gathered outside ueno branches this week seeking access to their savings but to no avail.

As a currency designed to eliminate trusted third parties, Bitcoin exists to give anyone the option to stop trusting banks and other financial institutions with their money. What happened to ueno bank isn’t new, and will continue happening until people learn that they don’t have to be hostages to a system that will protect itself and hang them out to dry when it matters most. Always remember, when you deposit money in a bank, you become an unsecured creditor of that bank and have effectively lent the bank your money. The bank becomes the legal owner of those funds and is free to use them as they see fit including in the allocation of those funds as credit.

In return, you hold an IOU, a legal claim against the bank, protected only to the extent applicable deposit guarantees and recovery rights allow. In short, your “deposit” is not sitting in a vault somewhere in the bank with your name on it, but it is the bank’s liability. Paraguayans are learning the hard way of what counterparty risk is and how black swan events like bank failures can ruin your entire life when you don’t have a plan B. By holding your money in fiat at a bank you participating in laundering the proceeds of crime from the largest regulated Ponzi scheme in the history of finance called credit-backed fiat currency.

Thanks to this episode, it’s very likely that the banking system in Paraguay will be consolidated and centralized into the hands of a few players in the name of responsible regulation, the tax payer will be on the hook to repay affected depositors (or even bail out the bank) and the profits will continue flowing to the shareholders of the newly consolidated banks. Socialized losses, privatized gains.

§What Bitcoin is actually for

These two recent episodes are one of many that have happened this year alone that keep reminding us of just how fragile our fraudulent financial system is, as well as how it can all go belly up overnight. The global banking system operates through layers of interdependent institutions, credit relationships, correspondent banking networks, payment processors and central bank settlement systems. A failure at one institution can propagate through these interconnected relationships, creating liquidity shortages, payment disruptions and contagion elsewhere in the system.

The underlying problem has never been resolved simply by making banks bigger or adding more layers of regulation. If it wasn’t clear enough already, Bitcoin is NOT an investment asset; that’s Wall St’s framing to keep you in the fiat ponzi. Bitcoin is money that serves as an alternative payment and settlement system outside of the fiat financial system. This creates the possibility of a more resilient financial architecture in which individuals and businesses can maintain access to an alternative settlement network even when conventional payment infrastructure becomes unavailable, hostile or dysfunctional.

Bitcoin gives individuals the option to assume responsibility for their own money rather than being permanently dependent on institutions whose interests may not align with theirs. The objective should not be to replace one centralised financial authority with another, nor to create a new class of financial gatekeepers operating under a different brand. It should be to create an open monetary system in which individuals have a credible exit from institutional dependency.

A more resilient financial system is not one in which a handful of enormous banks are considered too big to fail. It is one in which the failure of any individual institution does not deprive millions of people of their ability to transact, save or participate in economic life. That is the difference between systemic resilience and institutional dependency.

§The Lesson Of The Week

The Varoufakis argument gets the problem precisely backwards. The fact that monetary decisions distribute economic power is not an argument for giving political institutions greater control over money. It is an argument for ensuring that no political institution has a monopoly over the monetary system in the first place.

Money should not be an instrument through which governments reward their allies, punish their adversaries, finance their deficits or dictate the terms of economic participation. It should be neutral infrastructure that allows people to exchange value freely, regardless of their nationality, political affiliation or relationship with the state.

The separation of money and state is not an abstract ideological exercise. It is about ensuring that your ability to participate in economic life is not conditional on the goodwill of a bank, the discretion of a regulator or the political preferences of a government. The ultimate measure of monetary freedom is not how much money you have in your bank account; it is whether you can still access, hold and transfer your wealth when the institutions that promised to safeguard it decide that you can no longer do so.