There aren't guarantees in life, but I think you're wholly misunderstanding the scale we're talking about. Visa processes about 200M transactions/day. Almost

There aren't guarantees in life, but I think you're wholly misunderstanding the scale we're talking about. Visa processes about 200M transactions/day. Almost $17B/day. These are not small numbers. I think you're also misunderstanding of how the financial system looks at payment rails - there's a pent up (ongoing?) demand for better ones. Also, while merchant transactions are one market, they certainly aren't the only one. There's lots of talk about international remittances. This is a $500B+ market[1] that is growing at an insane rate[2]. Average fees are 9.3%[3] and way worse for some countries - it's not unheard of to say, pay $40 for sending $100 from the US to Kenya. Now that is a market that's ripe for disruption (you'd have to balance bitcoin inflows w/ capital flight for the economy to work, but it's worth pointing out there's already a service linking bitcoin w/ M-Pesa: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/one-third-of-kenyans-now-have-a-bitcoin-wallet http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/one-third-of-kenyans-now-ha... ) IMO, this is a particularly useful page which gives some context on where bitcoin currently sits with other payment networks: http://www.coinometrics.com/bitcoin/btix http://www.coinometrics.com/bitcoin/btix [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-17/global-immigrants-send-500-billion-back-home.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-17/global-immigrants-s... [2] http://gulfnews.com/business/economy/global-remittance-flow-grows-10-77-to-514-billion-in-2012-world-bank-1.1172693 http://gulfnews.com/business/economy/global-remittance-flow-... [3] http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Remittance-Market-Ready-and-Waiting-for-its-Skype-Moment.pdf http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Remittance-Mark...