TABLE OF CONTENTS People have used different forms of currency for thousands of years. Until only a couple of decades ago, commerce meant buying or selling goods directly with cash. In fact, paper money and cheques have only been in use since the second half of the nineteenth century.
The invention of the credit card in the 1950s marked a turning point. [1]Credit cards became an immediate success and removed the barriers for global commerce, but also quickly revealed their sensitivity to fraud and bad credit.
The growth of the World Wide Web has been another landmark in the evolution of commerce. Within the span of no more than a decade since 1994, the World Wide Web grew from an experiment into a global information network that reaches from the heart of Manhattan to Kathmandu. Any business now has frictionless access to hundreds of millions of customers worldwide, at near zero cost.
Mobile networks have added a new dimension to the equation. Because of their high penetration, personal nature, and universal coverage, mobile phones have all the potential to replace the purse, the credit card, and the personal cheque. Why carry around all these objects if they can be combined in one personal device?
There is also a price to pay. Business transactions in the old days were physical meetings between buyer and seller, and the transaction would leave the seller with cash in hand. Today, all a seller may know about a buyer is an IP address and a credit-card...
