Hypatia (🌸, 🌿)

Yes, the Lambo bros are louder. But there are currently more cypherpunks, more hacktivists and a lot more code, good code. We have country wide decentralized networks built on MeshCore. We have ecash, zero knowledge proofs deployed at scale, we have GrapheneOS, usable Linux desktop distributions, anonymization networks. There has never been a better time to live the cypherpunk dream than now. Because. Cypherpunk future (that we all wanted) is now. People, masses of people, are just loud. That's what always happens. But that's a feature of history, it doesn't go in one direction, there are subsets that do their thing and they thrive. And we do thrive now, more than ever.

I understand why you are upset and it's of course a huge problem, but a quick lesson and correction, which would be useful in understanding and hopefully individually preventing this situation in the future. Banks do not lend funds that they have somewhere. They did not use the public funds, or your funds (or mine for that matter, I also had some money at Ueno). Banks lend out money they create out of thin air. That is why it's called fractional reserve banking. What happens in the books is they credit the borrower's bank account with new guarani (they don't take it from any other account) and on their assets side, they have (risk adjusted) your promise to repay that loan (future liquidity) plus interest rate. They need to have reserves in most countries and enough equity to cover losse. What happened with Ueno is that ratio of the bank's own capital to risk weighted assets on the books went way below 12% requirement. But note that the requirement is not based on deposits directly, it is a share of bank's own money (not the deposits!) to risk weighted assets. Why is this crucial to understand for the future. A bank, any licensed bank in any country, has a special magic privilege to create money out of thin air (thin air=credible pinky promise to pay, and some share capital to go with it, if they valued the pinky promise incorrectly). When you give money to a bank, you hope they got their calculation right. But the margin is very thin - above 12% ratio in Paraguay is fine, below 12% is not fine. But see how the thin the margin is. Any kind of crisis, any major change in the economy (and who would expect changes these days, everything seems to be so stable, right?) could very well wipe out this tiny error margin. What is admirable in Paraguay is how fast they act. For individuals - know that this is happening. It will happen over and over again in any fractional reserve bank. The possibility to create money out of thin air is like the Ring and if you want to be safe, you go as far away as possible from people who try to use its power. What can you do individually then? First, save money. Even little by little, spend a bit less than you make. And that saving should be held in something that has no counterparty risk. Some cash (that has devaluation risk, but there's no counterparty), some gold or precious metals, some Bitcoin. Note that with Bitcoin, people consider stablecoins a good alternative (usdt, etc), but note that it is different. Usdt has a counterparty that acts like a bank. Bitcoin does not. So what you gain in value stability, you lose in counterparty risk exposure. Also, Bitcoin balance on binance is not Bitcoin, that has a counterparty risk. I've seen people in Paraguay proudly showing me they save in bitcoin and then they open binance wallet - that compounds value risk and counterparty risk. You're right to be upset. You're right to want your money back. But now you know what to do to avoid this mistake in the future. Read @LynAldenContact's Broken Money.