I was talking to a colleague about how Dwolla implements a similar pay network. I don't know Square's implementation. It varies with different P2P providers. So

I was talking to a colleague about how Dwolla implements a similar pay network. I don't know Square's implementation. It varies with different P2P providers. Some create their own 'rails' in the backend (PopMoney, etc.). Some follow the 'clearing firm' / brokerage model of the commodities / equity markets. They have accounts in all major banks with deposit (debit) accounts and simply do an inner-bank transfer on both ends on your (and your recipient's) behalf. That got me thinking though. It's 2013. The ideal solution is not to be beholden to any centralized authority or group of 'clearing' accounts for routing. The ideal solution is security but flexibility and distributiveness. The ideal solution is a network of trust with similar 'hubs' / 'clearing firms' that one can choose to route through automatically, have all the routing be automated for you via solid protocols. There is the chance to create clusters of payment routing networks that are more elegant. It would make money movement so much more liquid in our world. And would be a really great thing. Maybe Square is the beginning of that solution. I hope it gets even more distributed though. It's mostly companies leading the way for this. And good for them. But there's another possibility: something very open, but given the right protocols and architecture, very secure. There is no incentive to create such an architecture other than the amazing world that it would mean where you could travel to different countries and authenticate seemless money transactions to whoever had a phone or email endpoint (again there would have to be name servers + some sort of money equivalent of SMTP + TLS / chains of trust + distributed clusters of shared 'clearing' bank accounts + routing algorithms to these accounts, etc.). But that didn't stop Tim Berners-Lee or the early internet folks....