For those that don't know me, I have spent the past decade working for traditional Financial Institutions, helping to facilitate online payments for millions of users and businesses globally. My foray into the online payments industry was by accident. Shortly after the iPhone launched, I had founded a company called Wannaskin and iAccessory, a website where you could upload a picture and we would create a phone cover (skin) for you. It took us 3 weeks to build the website, including the upload-and-print functionality, but it took more than 4 months to get approved by a payment service provider. A payment service provider (PSP) is a third-party company that allows businesses to accept electronic payments, such as credit cards and debit cards as well as alternative payments such as PayPal and local payment methods iDeal.
As an online entrepreneur, the last thing you think about when building a website is the payment capabilities. That's because when you're done building, you expect the payment provider to be plug-and-play and just work. Nothing could be further from the truth. It took us 4 months to get approved by a PSP, countless hours spent completing old fashioned paperwork and a lot of frustration. I say I got into the payments space by accident because this inefficiency intrigued me and I decided "there had to be a better way". There are countless other stories of traditional finance inefficiencies. Sending money from the US to Europe shouldn't take 5 days (literally waiting for someone to push a button at the bank) or EUR 10 + an exorbitant forex fee. And that's where Bitcoin comes into play. This explanation of Bitcoin by Anton M. Antonopoulos, author of books "The Internet of Money" and "Mastering Bitcoin" captures all the reasons why I think Bitcoin is the new internet of money.
Have a listen:
To learn more about Bitcoin: https://www.fairbank.io/insights/what-is-bitcoin-0
