I think you may have it backwards. The government, any government, is essentially an engine for driving money to the special interests. They do that through taxation and regulation to get distributed costs and concentrated benefits. Bankers may be a special interest group, but we are a more concentrated and therefore more special group. For bankers, it is far more cost effective to hedge against a bitcoin takeover by buying a small stake in it than it is to fight us with largely ineffective prohibitions and regulations. Most bankers who even know about bitcoin think it is a joke or a fad. The banksters who see it as a threat are not numerous enough to fight it and don't want to do it if their fellow bankers are going to free ride on their efforts. So they hedge and join us. The other bankers won't realize what a disruptive technology it is until it's too late. they are the Tower records and blockbuster video owners of the financial world.
I used to work in the music business - it was unreal how it resisted downloads, until it was too late and sank their entire business model.
After fighting and slagging off Napster et al, Steve Jobs came along and took over 25% of the entire music business at a stroke - and it was game over.
They never saw it coming, refused to.
Their business model is going to change regardless of whatever else they do. You can't uninvent new technology. If I was a bankster, I would try to pull a Steve Jobs (Steve Job?) using my existing market leverage while I still had it. The first bankster to break from the pack wins. Or they all lose and someone else just takes over their entire market. Bitcoin is coming. My bank closed today because of the weather. WTF?? the weather? seriously?
Bitcoin today is like the Internet before the World Wide Web. We don't even have our mass adoption app yet. We have email where we can message a few thousand other nerds. Overstock, Coinbase and Bitfinex are like Usenet, telnet and gopher. Official approval is like when America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy opened their internet portals. Still waiting for our Mozilla Browser.
Agreed, to paraphrase a certain cigar-loving American politician... "It's the network, stupid"
I was once told an old story that the mayor of Chicago was being shown one of the first telephones in action.
He boldly announced "One day, every big city will have one of these"
I believe in the network of exchange being created - value and real tangible transactions of wealth being transferred effortlessly and for little cost.
It is massive, and Wall Street cannot buy shares in it - so it confuses them, perhaps that is why they are not 'in' like it has been expected.
Or maybe they don't even see what is happening....
My hunch is the big financial industry is full of dinosaurs - too big and cumbersome to be nimble. It would take them six months to even realise they had an erection.
