TPPTB - The Payment Processor That Be

[freequant]

Governments let Internet be.
They had a chance to kill or take control of the technology in its infancy.
But they didn't. They let it grow into a pervasive uncontrolable global Thing.
Internet is now accepted as The Network That Be, and governments have adapted and learned to deal with it.
They may be giving the impression that hey are trying to rule the network, but all they are really doing is trying to control how the network interacts with the land and economy they are in charge of ruling.
They do so by regulating the access points (the ISPs), and monitoring / filtering the exchanges between the network and their national space.
They are just watching their frontiers.

Bitcoin is likely on the same trajectory as Internet once was.
Yesterday, it was a wasteful clumsy scam-looking project, run by basement dwellers, and highly unprofessional.
Today, it is getting its own dedicated hardware and becoming energy efficent.
It is being adopted by professionals, and has much stronger fundamentals and a lower volatility.
Day by day, it is becoming The Payment Processor That Be and governments are sitting on the side and watching like they have been watching passively the inception of TOR or BitTorrent.
When the time comes where Bitcoin starts posing real challenges for the economy, it will be already too powerful, pervasive, popular and deeply rooted into the core of our civilization to be possibly extracted without killing the patient.
At that time, it will be easier and more effective for governments to control how Bitcoin interacts with their economy, than trying to fight the network itself.
As they did with the Internet by regulating the ISPs, they will regulate and monitor the access points, the exchanges, and enforce at their level KYC and AML regulations. And this will pretty much solve the problem.
Bitcoin will remain untouched.

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[julz]

I agree... but it does need to grow a lot more whilst still in the unthreatening 'larval' stage.
I think this is why Satoshi seemed perturbed by a high profile outfit like Wikileaks using Bitcoin so early on.

[Boussac]

Very well said !

In my experience so far, it's easier indeed to present bitcoin as a new "open" collaborative transaction processing network than as a new currency.

I believe this is attributable to the fact that most people will easily recognize they don't know shit about electronic transaction processing while they think they know how a monetary system works (when in fact most of them do not).

As a result, we will get a LOT more objections about a "new kind of money" than about using a new tx proc network.

Money is only a consensus after all. If we build the consensus on that ground or on another does not matter in the end.

The fact that the incumbent payment processors accumulate revenues in excess of 15 billion USD annually in the USA alone is helping us a lot in making our point.

[evoorhees]

+1 OP, well-stated.

[hazek]

Yep OP, that's how I advertise it to merchants.