Re:MasterCard will give merchants the ability to accept cryp...
by dragonwriter on Friday February 12, 2021 @05:29AM
(#26112192)
> So anyone who thinks that there should be public distributed protocols for exchanging money is a hopeless idealist and just making things worse.
No, anyone who thinks people should exclusively directly make use of “public distributed protocols” is a hopeless idealist.
They aren't “making things worse”, though, except from the perspective of their own hopeless ideal.
> So I guess in your opinion it would be better if digital transactions just continued to go through monopoly private middlemen.
It can't be both “middlemen” and “monopoly”; it's at worst an oligopoly. And, no, I didn't say that. But more competing low-level payment networks makes middlemen that can abstract them more valuable to most consumers and merchants.
No, anyone who thinks people should exclusively directly make use of “public distributed protocols” is a hopeless idealist.
They aren't “making things worse”, though, except from the perspective of their own hopeless ideal.
> So I guess in your opinion it would be better if digital transactions just continued to go through monopoly private middlemen.
It can't be both “middlemen” and “monopoly”; it's at worst an oligopoly. And, no, I didn't say that. But more competing low-level payment networks makes middlemen that can abstract them more valuable to most consumers and merchants.