Why is American Internet finance a joke?

Crazy Review : John Biggs is the CEO of the mysterious Bitcoin startup Freemit and the former editor-in-chief of TechCrunch. In his article, he proposed that the behavior of banks that refuse to change and Internet financial investors that are timid in destroying innovation will harm the interests of consumers. Although traditional industry participants in the United States regard innovations such as blockchain as suspicious things, and technological exploration has lagged far behind Europe and Asia, there are still millennials who insist on their dreams of innovation. I hope that the United States can have more people like Erik Voorhees who can actually implement new technologies.

Translation: Annie_Xu

John Biggs, CEO of secretive bitcoin startup Freemit and former editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, argues in his article that banks that refuse to change and timid Internet finance investors are undermining innovation and harming consumer interests.

John Biggs

Through conversations with Internet finance investors and their investment targets, I discovered a fact:

Internet finance in the United States is like a popular game of buck-passing among entrepreneurs, and frightened bankers and investors are deterring them from getting involved.

If there’s any industry that’s ripe for disruption, it’s the timid world of financial technology.

During the creation of Freemit, we met countless entrepreneurs who were in the same boat: They wanted to change the current cautious way of doing things, to create new ways to pay, transfer money, or form contracts.

These entrepreneurs have much more complex pedigrees than the teams that built Silicon Valley's new darlings, and they also understand the limitations of Internet finance and the potential risks.

Before we start something we are constantly told that the road ahead is difficult and that there could be a crash at any turn.

This is an absolute truth, and it is endlessly frustrating. The US Internet finance sector is full of inbred cowards, and the space for innovation will always depend on the ability to integrate into real-life scams.

A thankless job

America’s efforts in Internet finance have not been rewarded accordingly and are instead viewed as suspicious.

Anything that caused concern among the big banks was immediately eliminated, innovative thinking was stifled, and the remaining "software solutions" were force-sold to IT managers by entrepreneurs for millions a year.

The result is a constant stream of yes-men who become defenders of the interests of Wall Street trading tycoons; in the end, entrepreneurs naturally remain content with the status quo and are content to use a few software to slightly simplify the trading process.

In short, they are happy to forgo real innovation as long as the banks, regulators, and people who are unhappy about server outages are happy.

Of course, there are people who work hard to change the status quo, but their efforts are not rewarded. Sit down and talk to financial conservatives and you will find that they are afraid to fix their shaky corporate structures or are too lazy to make the effort.

Any great idea that could pull the banking industry out of its depression was viewed as suspect.

Abandon ship and escape

Don’t get me wrong, what I am saying is that the banking industry is in crisis and we millennials simply don’t want to be part of an outdated financial system.

Donna Sabino

Donna Sabino, Senior Vice President of Ipsos MediaCT said:

"They have their own tools and rules that ignore the legacy systems we have in place in some institutional sectors. Millennials can't imagine moving $41 trillion in assets using a mid-century system."

Laura Shin writes:

"Their financial behaviors may redefine financial services and the way financial services firms interact with their customers."

To some extent, it is possible to improve the current situation by redesigning outdated systems, but even this approach has met with great resistance. I once talked to a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase about chatbots, and he said we already have chat tools. Of course, he was referring to the use of SMS to obtain account balance information.

Who took the right approach? The only American I can think of is Erik Voorhees, who simply gave up the entire United States and all client funds.

He proved in his own way that there was no benefit in setting up an Internet finance company in the United States, and those regulators who deliberately intervened were helpless. He even disdained to block the news that the company was hacked; you know, banks deliberately concealed such things for several months; from this point, you can see how bold he is.

Stupid blockchain

How can American Internet financial companies survive?

Of course, the most important thing is to accept the existence of risks and the true nature of technological innovation; and this does not mean a two-way choice of technology and lip service to value.

Andreas Antonopoulos

Technology expert Andreas Antonopoulos said:

"They start out in denial, saying 'Hey, Bitcoin, go hang out with your hacker buddies.' Then they see Bitcoin isn't going anywhere, and they get angry. 'Bitcoin is for criminals, terrorists, pedophiles! Let regular people control the money, and the world will end.'"

Besides, pretending to support innovation is really silly.

“‘So you built this open source, decentralized, borderless, peer-to-peer, open innovation, open access system,’ and ‘well we can build our own non-open source, non-decentralized, borderless, access-restricted system and control our own blockchain.’ But they’re getting off topic.”

No one would deny that the trusteeship of vast wealth is a daunting responsibility.

But the practice of giving up innovation for the sake of security relieves the responsibility of trust; like the parable of the master giving money to three servants, I found that Europe and Asia were the first two servants and the United States was the third.

The first two servants invested their master's money and made a lot of money for their master; while the third servant chose to bury the money, thinking it would be safe this way.

The United States was the stupid third party and got nothing, while the rest of the world benefited.