So... given that adding full support for BTC to the existing payments infrastructure is achievable without too much technical effort, it strikes me that effort would be best spent overcoming the non-technical objections/blockers, rather than investing effort reinventing technical solutions that don't seem to be needed.... am I missing something? Is the main problem that people don't like the fees imposed by Visa/MC? Dislike of the idea of an intermediary? (i.e. a vision that all BTC users in the future will transact directly across the Blockchain?) Something else?
The idea Is that If there is inefficiencies in the system in the form of middlemen then they should be eliminated, I dislike Visa & MC, they between them have a duopoly, they refused to process payments for wikileaks they are not your fiend. We have been given technology that liberates us from centralisation and now everybody wants to know how they pay their taxes or who they can use to store their bitcoins and why can't we use the normal payment systems, This is ridiculous if we do theses things then we might as well give up using bitcoin.
OK - so there's several things there then, right?
1) Belief/assertion that middlemen are bad. Not sure I buy this... any system that can bring together two large groups of people (customers and merchants) is going to be valuable --- users of the system get value from the "middleman" service MC/Visa provide... it saves them having to worry about sorting out multilateral links/contracts/relationships, etc.
2) Claim that Visa/MC are anticompetitive / duopolostic. I think this is probably accurate but also unavoidable... and it's hard to see how to fix it.... the card network business has huge scale efficiencies and network effects... a small number of large players is what you would expect to see. This makes it really, really hard for small players to operate profitably. Not sure how to fix it since it's a fundamental property of the market structure from what I can see
3) Ability to refuse some transactions. This strikes me as a really good argument - they have this power as a result of 1) and 2) and it would strike me as being abusive.... as you suggest, however, it suits law enforcement bodies since it provides them with an easy way to stop transactions they don't like..... I just wonder if this would be enough to enable the creation of an entirely parallel network (especially one that would presumably also benefit from the effects of 1) and 2)!)