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Bickering Blocks US Mobile Phone Payments
theodp writes "Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. You wouldn't have to if you lived in Japan, where people have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. While nearly everyone who's tried it has liked this form of payment, consumers in the United States won't be able to wave-and-pay anytime soon: The companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses can't agree on how to split the resulting revenue."
They can also be hacked, which is also pretty neat if you're the hacker, but not if you're trying to build an infrastructure based on the cards.
Come to think of it, Chaum's electronic money (digital cash), especially the off-line anonymous variants, would be very well suited to the kind of mobile payments discussed in the article; and such a solution would preserve all the important properties of "ordinary" cash.
Those restrictions are quite legal in the UK. The shopkeeper isn't under any obligation to sell you anything, refusing £50 notes is common and legal (and as a side-effect, if you want £50 notes for some reason you'll need to ask at the bank when you make a withdrawl).
A debtor is always allowed to pay in cash (except you can only use up to £2 worth of 1p or 2p coins, and £5-ish of 5/10/20/50p coins, no limit for £1 or £2 coins). But there's no debt when you're buying something from a store.