John McDonnell: How Bitcoin Will Win Online Payments

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Solving the pain points of online payments was the applications that garnered the most attention in Bitcoin’s early days. In recent times, as consumer adoption of Bitcoin payments has been underwhelming much of that attention has shifted elsewhere. Nevertheless, companies keep working hard on making the vision of a universal, global payment system a reality.

Among those companies, one stands out as the top contender to compete with existing payment systems: Bitnet. Funded with a heavy warchest and the company is ran by veterans of Visa and Cybersource, a company started in 1994 to help merchants accept credit cards online that was sold to Visa in 2007 for $2bn. They have been working behind the scenes to get Bitcoin to break through with merchants.

CEO John McDonnell joined us for an important discussion of how online payments work today, why they are broken and how Bitcoin will revolutionize the industry.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The story of Cybersource and payments in the early day of the internet
• The pain points with online payments for merchants and consumers today
• The role of the different actors such as payment processors, card networks, merchants and issuing banks
• The niches where Bitcoin payments could break through first
• Why coming from inside the payment industry provides Bitnet with a huge advantage
• Why they are focusing on Payment Service Providers instead of acquiring merchants directly
• His view on BitLicense and how it will affect Bitcoin payment processors

Episode links:

• Bitnet
• Richard Gendal Brown: Why the payment card system works the way it does
• Richard Gendal Brown: Simple explanation of fees in the payment card industry
• Wikipedia e-commerce credit card payment systems

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/087