Felix Salmon — The payments impasse

I’ll say this for bitcoin: it’s got a whole new class of people, like Matt Levine and Guan Yang, increasingly interested in one of my longstanding obsessions — payments. (You might be surprised to learn how hard it is to get people interested in payments.) Guan’s post, along with the response to it from Simple’s Shamir Karkal, provide a techie’s viewpoint into a question which many non-Americans have when they start living in this country: how on earth can can moving money from one person to another be so difficult, expensive, and time-consuming?

The simple answer, as Karkal hints at, is that we’re suffering from a particularly toxic combination: an outdated payments system combined with a seemingly powerless central bank, which is happy to let the big banks dictate the pace of change (or lack thereof). And as American Banker’s Kevin Wack explained in a great piece last November, the big banks are very good at vetoing even incremental improvements in the US payments infrastructure.

Econoblog
The payments impasse
Felix Salmon