Mercaturphagia: Bitcoin vs. Third-party Banking Intermediaries

Credit card processors Visa, MasterCard, and American Express exercise a great deal of power as they are the mediating bodies that monitor, handle, and charge parties that wish to send money or assets between one another. In their book, "The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order", Australian economic journalist Michael J. Casey and American financial journalist Paul Vigna argue that the use of Third-party intermediaries has its roots in 600 years ago in Florentine economics. Third-party intermediaries establish trust between two parties. The centralized nature of Third-party banking intermediaries creates a dependency on such institutions existing. Like the Medici Family Bank in the Florentine Renaissance era, today, banks and intermediaries find that centralization provides authority and power. Within the American economic system, these intermediaries have supplanted themselves in commerce for decades.