Quote from: Haplo on April 05, 2012, 11:25:49 AM

Quote from: benjamindees on April 05, 2012, 07:49:57 AM

Quote from: benjamindees on April 05, 2012, 07:49:57 AM

Then on top of that add interfacing with the merchant's accounting system. And besides magstripe and contact/contactless credit cards, you're competing with Paypal and Dwolla and that new Canadian Mint thing. It's likely that none of those will cooperate to share hardware. Sad

Do paypal and dwolla have physical POS methods that don't rely on VISA or mastercard? Maybe I'm missing something. That canadian mint thing sounds like a citizen tracking collar to me. It'll be a disaster of human rights and a disaster of identity theft. I don't think Canada is really the ideal market for bitcoin anyway.

Dwolla is a takeover target once they reach scale, it may even be after they go public if the I-Bankers can circle a deal. Paypal senior management is being poached by the big banks and Google as they look to take back share in non US markets via their SWIFT relationships under the guise (gun) of FAFT's KYC rules. So neither are good analogies nor reliable partners. The banks don't like VISA/MC since they went public as the objective of the associations are no longer aligned with those of the banks. Meaning as public cos they now have to show increasing profits on a quarterly basis, prior to going public they were a utility function operating on behalf of "all" participating banks.

The banks will look to alternate clearing and settlement systems as these opportunities present themselves. This effort will be lead by the Cash Management/Treasury guys (think checking and payment services for businesses). So for example, KRAFT's snack food distributors in Indonesia, will use a handheld internet device to collect e-payments from the retail stores on their route. The store owners may have a cell phone, or even just a simple pin number linked to a bar code that identifies them and their account at the bank. The point is that where there hasn't been any installed infrastructure the one being developed is based on mobile technology. These direct connects to the bank use ACH (like Dwolla) or the local market equivalent and not VISA/MC. Thus in may ways, the US market is an anomaly, we have little economic reason to move beyond card-based systems.... at least for the moment. Thus the craze over flimsy dongle technology like Square and ISIS.

I still think that mobile payments is the way to go, and that all of you gents with mad skills ought to working on making a mobile app that uses tokenization and secure data transmission to effect payments via an automated BTC clearing house.