It's interesting to think of how various technology-business complexes could have unfolded differently f they had gotten onto a different track. What if Google

It's interesting to think of how various technology-business complexes could have unfolded differently f they had gotten onto a different track. What if Google had been bought pre-IPO? Could the World Wide Web have "lost" to some other technology, perhaps centrally controlled? etc. You end up with a lot os scenarios where certain things get set back decades. It's hard to imagine WWW and its internet riding siblings thriving in the same way under some different paradigm. The creative zeal of the telecommunications industry is not a force I would like to rely on for progress. Anyway, I think that most "money" industries might be like the web if it hadn't hit some lucky breaks. Financial services, ways of moving money from one place to another are incredibly clunky, bureaucratic, expensive, difficult to understand, slow, expensive and expensive. Credit cards are expensive, complicated, & oligopolistic. Bank transfers are slow and bureaucratic. It's ridiculous that heavy, stealable, physical money is cheaper to handle than electronic variants. This is all a very straightforward example of "transaction costs," a concept at the centre of many basic and fundamental economics theories. Basically, transaction costs permeate everything in economics by reducing efficiency and limiting the velocity and cumulative volume of transactions, which are one of the few very basic elements in the economics' periodic table (say, resources, labour, technology, consumption & transactions… or something). Many massive efforts have been made to reduce transactions costs in the form of barriers to entry or international trade. Transaction costs inherent in our financial services industry are the same sort of problem, probably even more important. A 10, 100 or 1000X reduction in transaction costs could have a lever effect on the economy similar to the discovery of a new energy source, continent, new method of communication, better legal paradigm or some other fundamental column in an economy. This is why I was (and still am) hoping for cryptocurrencies to succeed. Who knows where it could go. Whatever you think of Walmart, they are obsessed with costs and efficiency. I'm not surprised this pushes their buttons. The suboptimal state of electronic payment is as bad or worse than the energy industry in the worst days of cartels.