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January 02, 2014, 12:12:06 AM |
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Traders specifically or Bitcoin in general?
Paypal could see the Bitcoin network as competition, and transformative competition at that.. Once upon a time, there were questions about whether Paypal would be legal, and they had Mastercard and Visa looking at them as transformative competition to be thwarted. Now they're on the other side of the divide and, like any incumbent, shouldn't be expected to be very happy with a newcomer in their market.
Bitcoin takes the disintermediation PayPal started to another level entirely, requiring no intermediary at all if both parties are happy with the cryptocurrency and don't need it immediately transformed into something else. If a party does need the coins transformed into their local currency, somewhere along the way an exchange needs to be involved. That "last mile" into fiat is a necessary enabling capability until people begin to think of Bitcoin as a unit of account instead of just translating BC prices into $ (etc.) for every transaction. If I were PayPal, MC, Visa etc. trying to impede Bitcoin adoption, I'd be going after the early enabling capabilities.
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