All I’ve said until now should help to explain the disruptive potential of blockchain technologies. Its success would mean the obviation of whole payments cartel.
The Bitcoin infrastructure is not owned, but is a de-facto commons. This raises difficult questions about governance, which became a serious problem when a fork, Bitcoin XT was proposed. Decisions in Bitcoin are taken democratically, not with one person/one vote, but one miner/one vote. The owners of the mining machines are not representative of all Bitcoin’s stakeholders. The major dilemma in the community is now whether to develop the system towards greater adoption by complying with regulation, or to continue in the legal grey areas but upholding libertarian ideals. There is much confusion in the cryptocurrency discourse about the decentralisation of money and payments. All cryptocurrencies are built on a singleton ledger which is distributed across many machines. A single ledger is a point of centralisation, as is a single currency, even if there are many copies of the ledger in a distributed data architecture. Advocates of economic and financial decentralisation are very pleased to have witnessed the arrival of blockchain technologies, but cannot celebrate all the focus on a single currency with a single issuance policy (or algorithm) on a singleton ledger. Many have envisaged a multi-currency marketplace with cryptocurrencies freely competing, thus allowing for a deeper decentralisation, but progress in this direction is as slow as uptake of those alt-currencies, almost none of which have any basis for being valuable, (such as a commodity backing or legal pronouncement) nor could compete with Bitcoin in any meaningful way.