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Big Banks Will Vie For Your Attention With Cardless ATMs and VR
tedlistens writes In the year that bitcoin began to grow up and Apple Pay was born—and massive cyberattacks—the country's largest financial institutions want you to imagine themselves as incubators. Three of the big banks opened up innovation labs to imagine what's next in mobile banking; some are starting their own accelerators. Meanwhile, the latest research estimates that U.S. mobile payments, currently at $3.7 billion, will grow to $142 billion within five years. Now an industry not exactly known for speed is approaching 2015 with an ethos that sounds more Silicon Valley than Wall Street, touting visions of fridges that shop for you, Google Glass and Oculus Rifts, and the kind of futuristic security they hope will inspire consumers to trust them and their technology in the first place. I like that both a local book shop, and the coffeehouse nearest my house, have bitcoin kiosks.
Yet they were among the first to adopt computers back in the 1950s.
A little detail often overlooked by the rabid space fanbois.
Who do you suppose were the first businesses to use computers? Who were some of the first businesses with online presences?
Even though for most people the ROI on running their own Bitcoin mining hardware is in the past, it still fascinates me that I can make my own money and buy things with Bitcoin.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"There’s still a lot of customers who don’t have debit cards..." Do these customers wait in line for a teller to withdraw cash? Why wait in line? Just go to the automated teller machine at the bank and withdraw cash. Most ATMs at the bank are outside the main business area and are also open 24 hours a day. Maybe I missed the explanation of why people don't have debit cards in the article.
The post says, " ... the latest research estimates that U.S. mobile payments, currently at $3.7 billion, will grow to $142 billion within five years."
The Forrester research piece linked says, in fact ...
Over the next five years, US mobile payments will grow from $52 billion in 2014 to $142 billion by 2019 with both national brands and local merchants.
I like that both a local book shop, and the coffeehouse nearest my house, have bitcoin kiosks.
I like that none of the shops I frequent don't have them.
How does it impact what banks are doing that the little book store and coffee shop near your house have a bitcoin kiosk? There is a shop near by where I work that will gladly barter with me over various other things I can bring in for trade or sale, big deal. There is a casino nearby too that now has slot machines that will dispense and accept tickets but no one cares other than the slot players who no longer have to lug around 50 lbs of nickles.
Time to offend someone
In the future - 2 or 3 days - an AI will be listening to all communication and take notes, answer questions etc. It's primary interface would be verbal, voice communications. It would have to know the voice and stress level of everyone in the house. Programmers could easily provide one voice recognition, and get money for each voice added to the repertoire This would be the beginnings of HAL or SkyNet depending... It would have to be aware of it's surroundings so as to not interrupt normal conversation or take sides in some human argument, but possibly call police, fire, ambulance when requested. Yeah I know this already was posited by some movie in the past, but it's time has come. How do we put "intelligence" behind the voice recorder? How good are the voice to word translators? Or does what I am proposing already exist. But we must make it smaller, faster, cheaper and much more intelligent.
Mobile payments are a bad idea. I can't believe anyone would buy something with their phone. The phone industry is regulated as a common carrier. They are not bound to the same regulations that a Bank or a Credit Card company has and therefore should never be trusted to perform a monetary transaction. There is no consumer protection and whereas Credit Card companies usually get 1 to 2% of a purchase price to perform a transaction, the mobile industry often gets up to 1/3 of a transaction. The more scammy the purchase, the more the cell phone company receives in exchange for looking the other way and always siding with the scam site. For example: the $10 a month joke of the day scams.
Never ever link a credit card or a bank account to a mobile phone. Not until they are subject to the same rules and regulations as the banks and the Credit Card companies.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
In America, a money transfer from one bank to another can take days to clear
Generally only true if you write a check which can take a few days to clear sometimes. Other methods of payment or funds transfer are considerably faster. ACH transfers take a few hours usually. Wire transfers are nearly instant.
Where do you live that the CoffeHouse and bookstore have bitCoin Kiosks??????
...can suck my dick. I left Bank of America for Digital Credit Union and I would never, EVER go back. You call DCU on the phone and guess what? You talk to an actual human! And they're HELPFUL.
Nope. They require a considerable amount of energy to create, that of all the mining rigs combined. The energy is used to update the transaction history (block chain). One of the transactions adds 25 new bitcoins to the history, but that event can't happen without finding a hash value for the block. Finding the hash value requires all the mining rigs to search for it, using energy.
It comes from nowhere. The time it takes or energy invested in searching is as irrelevant as the effort needed to mine gold or the cloth and ink needed to print bills.
Well, that wasn't the only reason - their practices (industry standard according to them) seemed to revolve around providing me with as many fees as possible. Last straw was my rent check bouncing the same day my paycheck deposited.
About 90% of bitcoins are used to bankroll illegal activities...not sure anyone should support that system.