“Bitcoin Competes with Western Union”

“Bitcoin Competes with Western Union”

Bitcoin developer Peter Todd said at the 2019 MIT Bitcoin Expo conference that Bitcoin does not compete with Visa and Mastercard payment systems, but with Western Union transfer service.

“When you look at the history of Western Union, it’s mostly a history of dodging regulations all around the world and paying billions of dollars worth of fines and fees, and so on, to make this happen. Of course, we don’t recognize that — because we just go see the friendly Western Union agent. But that’s what’s actually happening in the background there, and it’s a constant fight for them — ‘how do we keep running in these crazy countries?’ — that’s actually better competition to Bitcoin,” Todd said.

In addition, the Bitcoin developer, who is also a consultant for R3, said that freedom attracts him most in cryptocurrencies.

“The big picture is that if you can control people’s use of money, you essentially have probably even more control than if you can control their use of speech.”

It is interesting that, according to Todd, the Visa and Mastercard payment systems significantly outperform Bitcoin in countries with well-established regulation, while Bitcoin prevails in countries where they are trying to over-control cash flow.

Todd noted that the creation of JPMorgan’s own cryptocurrency by the bank and the social network Facebook is more a political and regulatory achievement than a technological one.

“The difference between JPM Coin and PayPal isn’t that big. PayPal — when you look at the early history — it very clearly wanted to create a coin, but they didn’t have the right political environment to do it. So instead, they called it a ‘payment service.’ But the tech between PayPal and JPM Coin is roughly the same. The APIs can look roughly the same. You might have a bit of crypto, and change a few auditing things, and maybe change some of the APIs, but it’s really not that different.” Todd said.

Note that in February it became known that Western Union is testing a Ripple solution for international transfers.

Author: Marko Vidrih

Published at Thu, 28 Mar 2019 17:17:03 +0000