Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin will do to the banks, what email did to the post office. True or false?
by
gendal
on 20/03/2013, 13:45:22 UTC
False.

Ask yourself: do you expect non-technical retail users to interact directly with the core bitcoin network if/when this takes off big-time?  Where transaction charges for every payment will become the norm? With complete transaction finality (and hence none of the consumer "protections" they have, rightly or wrongly, come to expect)? With the risk that a single computer virus could wipe out their entire net worth?

I would argue no. I would not expect non-technical retail users to interact directly with such a system.

Just as I would not expect them to hold an account with a central bank and transact over a country's real-time gross settlement system every time they need to make a payment.

Instead, I would expect retail customers to transact through intermediaries, whom they would trust to look after their balances, provide payment, reporting and other services.  Institutions that look very much like banks, in fact.

Now, in the absence of a central bank that can act as lender-of-last-resort and so on, it will be critically important for consumers to *choose* the right such intermediary but, as the citizens of Cyrpus are discovering this week, that is true in the non-Bitcoin world too.

So it doesn't take too much of a leap to imagine a world where deferred net settlement / ACH systems crop up to handle high-volume/low-value payments and where it is "banks" who provide the safekeeping/account handling services.... with the core bitcoin network doing what it does best: performing the role of a sound monetary authority and running the core RTGS.

Will it be the current set of banks who corner this market?  I wouldn't bet against it...