Why is it important to remove the middleman?
Having banks as middlemen can be very helpful.
They store your money for you, help you pay for things, and allow our modern financial system to operate in general. But what if you don’t have access to a bank?
This may be hard to imagine depending on where you live, but it’s estimated that around 1.7 billion people do not have access to traditional banking services. Think about trying to store value for you and your family in the modern age without a bank account! It is incredibly difficult for these people to invest, save, and grow their wealth when they can’t interact with the rest of the world’s financial system.
You only need a cellphone and the internet to store and transfer money with bitcoin. Thanks to advancements in technology, these two things are becoming increasingly easier to obtain. Bitcoin can bring modern finance to every person around the globe.
There’s another problem with middlemen though. They allow for the concentration of power.
Power concentration isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does create a single point of failure. If a single entity starts behaving maliciously, the whole system is damaged by its wrongdoing. This is much easier to understand in places around the world where governments and banks do not have the interests of their citizens as a top priority.
Bitcoin is not ruled by any one group, it’s ruled by every single person who uses it! Bad actors are not tolerated in the group of bitcoin users and there is no single point of failure.