The last section on trust & protection cuts to the heart of what it will take for general consumer adoption. But it leaves unstated the fundamental tension: the very nature of bitcoin is that of anonymity and finality. Whereas card and even ACH transfers can be reversed, bitcoin cannot.
The essay hints that it will take a central trust provider to regulate and police transactions to control for fraudulent activity. That's true. The key question is whether they'll be able to sustain the promised cost efficiencies of bitcoin by the time they build in this capability.
If the technical differences melt away and it just becomes another competitor to Visa/Mastercard, minus the billions of dollars of marketing and POS infrastructure over decades that have gone into cementing that network, then we really have to scrutinize whether "openness" and "unbundling" present a serious enough benefit to warrant the cost of a consumer global payments network rollout.
And couldn't a central trust provider work against this openness and unbundling? That's the whole point of a central entity, right?
The essay hints that it will take a central trust provider to regulate and police transactions to control for fraudulent activity. That's true. The key question is whether they'll be able to sustain the promised cost efficiencies of bitcoin by the time they build in this capability.
If the technical differences melt away and it just becomes another competitor to Visa/Mastercard, minus the billions of dollars of marketing and POS infrastructure over decades that have gone into cementing that network, then we really have to scrutinize whether "openness" and "unbundling" present a serious enough benefit to warrant the cost of a consumer global payments network rollout.
And couldn't a central trust provider work against this openness and unbundling? That's the whole point of a central entity, right?