MasterCard has become the latest company to fall foul of the bitcoin community, as reports that the credit card payments processing giant used a submission to the Senate enquiry to put forward the point that Australian regulators should move against digital currency adoption. With seeing Western Union trip over in the last few days – a trip that has riled the digital community as a whole, and it looks as though MasterCard is set for a similar fate over the coming few days. Here are a few select snippets from the submission, which you can read here if you want to find out more.
Any regulation adopted in Australia should address the anonymity that digital currency provides to each party in a transaction…
Contrary to transactions made with a MasterCard product, the anonymity of digital currency transactions enables any party to facilitate the purchase of illegal goods or services; to launder money or finance terrorism; and to pursue other activity that introduces consumer and social harm without detection by regulatory or police authority.
While there are valid concerns about the anonymity bitcoin affords its users, it seems as though it is only the payment processing organizations – i.e. those that are threatened by bitcoin’s mainstream adoption – that are rallying against it. This – to me at least – suggests that the anonymity side of things is simply a way of these companies targeting bitcoin and the digital currency concept as a whole, rather than them actually viewing it as a serious issue. What do you think?