Greensheet: Risks and Rewards of Bitcoin
Last edited Tue Feb 11, 2014, 11:41 PM - Edit history (1)
The Greensheet is a newsletter in the credit card/payments industry. This is from a longer Bitcoin article, which in turn is part of their current news roundup:
Risks and rewards
An alternative school of thought holds that the nature of bitcoin, as a mathematical value rather than a monetary one, makes it highly resilient to whatever regulations are imposed on it. "The innovative impact of bitcoin is in the protocol that drives it," said Tom Waters, Director of Sales at Bank Associates Merchant Services. "It is a mathematical solution to a logic problem. The driving force behind the growth of the bitcoin ecosystem is not traced to any one person, corporation or political agenda."
Because bitcoin is decentralized, the virtual currency will flourish wherever it is not regulated. "If the innovators who build new technologies around this protocol are prohibitively regulated or policed, the economic progress surrounding bitcoin development will simply shift to less regulated nations," Waters said. "Progress might be delayed, but it will be virtually impossible to stifle or kill altogether."
These characteristics of bitcoin also attract criminals to its use as a money laundering instrument. ISOs interested in offering the bitcoin payment option for merchants must weigh the potential profits from providing bitcoin functionality with its increasingly documented risks.
"Bitcoin is a relatively new technology with many young companies sprouting from its innovative capacity," Waters said. "As time progresses and these new companies demonstrate that they can be trusted, there will be a lot less risk in promoting it as a product. At the very least, ISOs should begin to understand the function and value it provides so they can be prepared to adopt it as part of their suite of services."
<snip>
http://www.greensheet.com/breakingnews.php?flag=breaking_news