Thread by @msantoriESQ

1/ 🚨 BREAKING: US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposes rule prohibiting large banks from discriminating against "legal but disfavored" customers like oil & gas biz, independent ATM operators and of course...

crypto companies.

2/ Crypto OGs know the single greatest impediment to widespread adoption has been and continues to be the lack of access to banking services.

In its early days, Bitcoin was caught up in Operation Chokepoint, and crypto more broadly is still caught up today

3/ Operation Chokepoint is a long-standing effort by political powers to cripple the growth of industries that were perfectly legal, but that they found distasteful.

4/ Instead of getting congress to pass a bill outlawing the industry, they just got regulators to make their lives tough by leaning on the banks to shut down their accounts.

5/ First it was adult industries, then non-bank financial services, then of course... bitcoin companies and now crypto companies more broadly.

6/ Today, the OCC, led by @BrianBrooksOCC is making a bold effort to curtail the practice by prohibiting banks from discriminating against politically disfavored but otherwise legal businesses

7/ The OCC just published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would outlaw such discrimination: occ.treas.gov/news-issuances…

8/ It applies only to large banks (which is quite sensible if you think about who the culprits are, and the relative costs of compliance) and it doesn't demand that banks enter lines of business for which they aren't prepared.

9/ I will do a deeper dive in short order but at the outset this strikes me as an idea whose time has come.

If you want to make law, go to congress and get it made.

Don't weaponize the whims of unelected, unaccountable officials to persecute the powerless.

10/ Wow check out the language:

"To provide fair access to financial services", a bank shall:

-"make each financial service it offers available to all persons... served, on proportionally equal terms"

11/ "To provide fair access to financial services", a bank shall:

-"not deny any person a financial service...except [as] justified by such person's quantified and documented failure to meet quantitative, impartial risk-based standards established in advance[!]"

12/ " "To provide fair access to financial services", a bank shall:

-"not deny any person a service when it... would disadvantage the person... from... competing in a market...or ...such a way that benefits another person [in which the bank itself has a financial interest]

13/ "To provide fair access to financial services", a bank shall:

-not deny, in coordination with others, any person a financial service the bank offers

14/ This proposed rule reads like a basic bill of rights for bank customers - one that you'd be shocked to hear didn't already exist.

Given the broad monopoly granted to banks today, we should be asking ourselves why on earth this bill of rights doesn't already exist.

15/ Libertarians, conservatives and the like might wonder to themselves "wait why should the government get to tell a private bank who it must and must not service?"

16/ Well, it was the gov that granted the banks monopoly power over banking in the first place. If you support a free market, why object to the gov limiting the discretion of the monopolist?

This proposal reins in the abusive consequences of the monopoly.

17/ Should democrats and other left-leaners object? Goodness I hope not. It's these very same abusive consequences that drive up the prices of basic financial services (check cashing, payday lending...) for those who need them most!

18/ So school me: Besides the purveyors of national chokepoints, who should object to this?

Just type your response here. Don't respond to the OCC with your comment. Just do it all right here in the safety of my crypto twitter thread. Where it can't hurt anyone 😜