I salute you sir. Excellent article, amusingly written - and (pardon the pun) right on the money! Money transfer is essentially subtracting from a number on on

I salute you sir. Excellent article, amusingly written - and (pardon the pun) right on the money! Money transfer is essentially subtracting from a number on one bank's hard disk and adding it to another on a second bank's hard disk. OK, it has to be done transactionally, and you need those numbers to be secure, but really... how hard is that? I read today that share traders are excited that they can now do trades between Chicago and NY in 8ms instead of 12ms. So why does it take me days to make a simple payment? And why does it cost more than a few micro-cents to do it? Revolutionising value transfer has the potential to be biggest benefit the internet gives us - but seems destined to be the last one realised. I make six figures providing online services for schools, and spend roughly half of my effort on payments. Partly resolving problems where the payment processor refuses to accept credit cards (from schools - hardly a high fraud demographic, and we've never had a customer charge-back), partly handling paper checks, partly trying to match ACH payments with customers. Bitcoin can't happen soon enough.