Matthew Driver, who is the President of MasterCard in South East Asia, has appeared in a video in which he criticised Bitcoin for being unstable, lacking consumer recourse, lacking a clear purpose and electronifying cash despite MasterCard's attempts to move beyond such transactions.
Claiming that Bitcoin conflicts with MasterCard, Driver said:
"We at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely as they go against the whole principal that we've established our business on, which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency and security and simplicity in the way that people lives their lives."
Driver also discussed cash, which he claimed facilitates anonymity, illegal activity and tax avoidance. He finished by stating anonymous transactions sound suspicious and asked why somebody would need to be anonymous.
The interesting thing about MC and Visa is that they were both created as *decentralized* networks, run by a membership association of independent banks. Of course now that they've both sold a large stake to public investors, this is less so. But these companies still have Dee Hock's "chaordic" organization in their DNA. Which is why a a regional manager from Australia speaking about bitcoin is really not representative of anything other than regional branch policy.