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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."
But I can't see how waving my cellphone over a reader is an improvement over waving my credit card. The credit card is thinner, lighter and more waterproof than a cellphone.
When I go out, I always carry a wallet. It has my driver's license, credit card and cash in it. My cell phone may or may not be with me, depending on what I'm doing. Maybe it's in the car, or my backpack. If I were going to wave anything over a reader, it would most likely be my wallet.
Perhaps it's because I'm over 50, but when I hear people talking about combining media player, cell phone, digital camera, [whatever] into one single unit, all I see is one item that does everything "not quite as well" as the original separate items. The cellphone/camera is only 3 megapixel...OK for some uses; but not as good as my Canon point-and-shoot. My phone can hold a few gigabytes of music, nothing like the 80 G in my iPod. If the performance of the composite were equal or better, you might have me as a customer, but for now, I'll pick and choose.
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.
...We have a similar system. You pay to wave...
I can't wait to be able to steal money just by walking through a crowded room and "charging" each person's phone $5.
We have enough of a problem today with people living way beyond their means, and impulse spending with the credit and debit cards we have today.
Aside from the obvious problems we have in the US with a sense of entitlement to the luxuries in life, I think easy means of payments like this work like chips in a casino do. They abstract the fact that you are spending REAL money. You forget that you bought those chips with cold hard cash. With things like credit / debit cards...you tend to forget that you have to pay for them later (wich cc's), or that your bank account just lost some cash to this transaction.
Waving a phone in front of a machine, to me, would have the same effect.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........