Comment There is no single "Bitcoin entity". (Score 1) 56
Just like lots of places create Bitcoin, lots of places create Visa cards.
Uh.... No. bitcoin is a protocol that anyone is free to use (or not).
There are no "places that create bitcoin", just lot of software instances using the bitcoin protocol to push BTCs around.
We can s/Visa/Bitcoin/g and it's still true:
if you pay with your Bitcoin, not only does paypal need to collaborate with a bank, that in turn collaborates with Bitcoin, but that requires you to also have an account in a that also works with Bitcoin.
...except for the part that there is no company called Bitcoin. There is no "Bitcoin Inc." controlling how bitcoin work and collecting fees.
There's an optional concept of "fees" in the bitcoin world. But that's not collected by an entity, that's a tip for miner to encourage them into including your transaction into the next block of the chain.
You could be using payment processor that collect a fee, or you could be using entirely different ways to send BTCs around. That's up to you.
Whereas, PayPal, Visa Inc. and MasterCard wordwide are very real companies collecting fees as middle men.
Visa and MasterCard form a duopoly that basically has nearly control of every payment anywhere.
There are no such company controlling anything in the bitcoin protocol. If you're not happy with a payment processor (say you hate both big processors bitpay and coinbase) you're free to move to any other one. As long as the new one follows the same protocol, it's still usable and interoperable with anyone else.
bitcoin is mainly a protocol, open for everyone to implement.
The closest to it in the "classic payment" world is SEPA. SEPA is *NOT* a company (unlike Visa and Mastercard), it's a standard for fast payment between banks in Europe.
Any SEPA compliant-bank can quickly and easily send money to any other compliant bank. You don't need to use the same bank as a merchant, as long as yours supports SEPA, you can also quickly send payments to the merchant. You're not forced to deal with the same company at both ends.