According to a recent article, Visa is aiming to maintain its dominance one way or another. Collab, an arm of Visa Europe, is investigating Bitcoin-oriented companies that could disrupt their business model ultimately. Visa is not against ultimately updating its methods to remain competitive if other technologies such as Bitcoin come along and accomplish the same task, only cheaper.
Visa told the International Business Times:
Take something outside of that – who is going to regulate it, authenticate it? If we skip a heartbeat of settlement here – can you imagine us saying: ‘We can’t settle the Lloyds cards today’; 15 million cards don’t work. That cannot lend itself to a blockchain, unregulated, uncontrolled, secretive, managed by a handful of people, process.
While some in the Bitcoin community are worried about the technology being able to compete directly with networks such as Visa, the company itself is not concerning itself with Bitcoin at present. While its Collab project may be actively looking at the work of block chain companies, it is not currently with the purpose in mind of investing in them long-term.
Also read: Mastercard Expresses Fear and Ignorance of Bitcoin in Writing
Certain technologies are, however, being developed which could ultimately serve the needs of a company like Visa, or any large-scale financial institution with massive sums to move. Applications of block chain technology such as Sidechains from Blockstream or others which aim to enable large institutions to easily make use of the Bitcoin block chain could ultimately prove to bring Bitcoin to the masses, as it were.
Image from antb / Shutterstock.
