Quote from: qwk on December 18, 2013, 03:52:45 PM

You probably never tried a smartphone wallet-to-wallet transaction. It's pretty straightforward, no fiddling involved (given connectivity, I always have problems with that Roll Eyes

). No waiting for confirmations needed, that's a common misconception.
The sentence "there's just no way it will be adopted" is plain ignorant.
It already is adopted by a growing number of merchants.

I am unsure wether merchants will sooner or later start using specialized hardware for it (I'd expect specialized POS-hardware for connectivity to legacy cash registers etc.), but rest assured, clients will just use their smartphones.

The reason is simple, they already have that.
Easy to setup, easy to use, easy to build an infrastructure.
And it's safe and convenient enough.

The idea of a specialized Bitcoin card, specialized hardware like the trezor etc. has been around for years. For some use cases, there's some merit to these ideas. Not for brick-and-mortar point of sales, though.

Actually my views on this come from having been both a participant and observer to many in-person retail transactions using the Blockchain app, etc. And yes, there's plenty of both fidgeting and waiting for tx's (compared to a tap-and-pay NFC, swipe or even chip-and-pin transaction).

Please note that I was explicitly referring to mainstream retailers (i.e. large, major retailers like grocery, dept. store, etc) - not small cafe's, shops etc. of which a (very small) percentage are already are adopting btc. These are usually single-location retailers with bitcoin-enthusiast owners/managers willing to sacrifice efficiency just for the novelty of accepting btc.

I'll stand by my "ignorant" statement that mainstream retailers will never adopt bitcoin payments in their current form - it will need to become much more streamlined. OpenCXP is a decentralized, non-commercial proposal that addresses these concerns (and can still use smartphones, without requiring them).