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by bunderbunder
4096 days ago
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> Bitcoin allows people who are unbanked, especially in developing countries, to hold and transmit money across the world at practically zero cost. Since bitcoin is decentralized, there are no middlemen like banks to take a cut or freeze your account. There aren't any now, but that's not because it's inherently impossible to have such a thing with BTC. It's just that the economy hasn't grown enough for them to exist yet. When (if) it does, they will come. I'm not going to say I know exactly how they will come, but I can think of quite a few plausible scenarios: - Honest-to-goodness BTC accounts with banks, to solve the same problem with lost/stolen wallet keys that they solved with lost/stolen money-under-the-mattress for traditional currency. - Wireless providers leveraging their position as most people's only constant/regular access to the Internet to exert control over how BTC is transferred over their networks. - Online wallets becoming necessary to help deal with scalability problems (not entirely dissimilar to how electronic transaction processing networks have superseded paper checks) and then leveraging that privileged position. |
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The important difference is that Bitcoin makes it much easier not to use a middlemen. You can't have a credit card without a middlemen, and the choice of middlemen is limited. Bitcoin abstracts your choice of middlemen away and the person you are buying from or paying to doesn't even notice whether you have chosen to use a middlemen or not.
My prediction is that using middlemen like banks (or should we call them central wallets?) will stay the norm, but they will have entirely new market pressures because not using them at all is suddenly a viable option.