“I’m basically an internet nerd,” Galbraith said. “We normally try to replace middlemen with a platform. But if you look at innovation in payments, I’m not so sure it’s going well.” Citing more than 600 mobile payment startups, Galbraith pointed out that all of them were attempting to introduce a new payments system on top of already existing platforms. Similarly, the need to control the platform payments come from means that “bitcoin is irrelevant,” Galbraith said. “It’s opposed to market forces, which favour platform monopolies.” If the future of money did come from the internet, he argued, it would come from one of those monopolies. “It’s not inconceivable that Facebook de facto becomes a bank, they have the scale. But Apple could have done that a long time ago, but it hasn’t. Why? Because the multiples in being a tech firm are better than banking, so why go into banking?”