Why banks fear Bitcoin?

Bitcoin heralds a new age more disruptive than that of today’s Internet. Disruption can be a good thing, especially when it affects banking, a failing set of business models which, for all the tweaks, have been virtually unchanged for millennia. Paradoxically, some banks are afraid of Bitcoin because it would force them to innovate.

Easy, Bitcoin will lead to ripples across the financial sector, it will create new winners and losers, and it will likely decentralize banking services and create micro markets to an extent not seen since the advances of the barter economy and the market economy combined. In fact, this is what the Internet of Value is all about—erasing the distinction between bartering, money and service exchange in any market. Once each potential good has a financially tradable and storable equivalent, “a bitcoin,” if you will, trade will explode in a myriad of directions impossible to predict by current algorithms. Intermediaries will come and go, and the end points of exchange nodes will become more important. To many bankers, this is a scary thought. To everyone else it is likely quite liberating.

I’d like to know what you think. Let’s talk in the comment box.