John Treadgold22 May, 10:31 AM. As the dust settles on Bitcoin’s fledgling flurry of rallies and crashes there is mounting speculation about its potential longevity. The Bitcoin economy is now worth more than $US1 billion and has now piqued the interest of financial regulators and industry players alike.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the US is currently investigating whether Bitcoins are being used as the basis for derivatives contracts and thus fall within their regulatory mandate. Earlier this year, a department of the US Treasury concluded that Bitcoin miners, or those that generate digital currency and then sell them for real currency, would fall under the classification of Money Service Businesses (MSB’s) in the US.
The elegance of the Bitcoin system is that it attempts to circumvent such controls but if the motivation is there it wouldn’t be difficult for those at the reigns of US banking licenses to exert pressure on those banks providing real currency liquidity to traders.
Any attempts at regulation or oversight would have a big impact on Bitcoins core principles of being anonymous and untraceable. While it would be difficult to control the sharing or trade of Bitcoins between individuals it seems their focus would be on those that are operating as intermediaries between Bitcoins and real currency.
As far as industry players are concerned, Bitcoin is little more than a fad. The head of MasterCard’s emerging payments division, Jorn Lambert, recently told The Australian Financial Review that the virtual currency was for ‘geeks’ and that the greater public will not latch onto it.
While Lambert’s sentiment attempts to play-down the growth of Bitcoin as a potential competitor in online financial transactions, it also demonstrates that the likes of Mastercard are well aware of the growth of Bitcoin. More pointedly, it shows the conservatism with which MasterCard views the future of online transactions. - Read more here: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/5/22/technology/can-bitcoin-go-mainstream
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