In a blog post by the PayPal president in which he announced that the company had 100 million active accounts, he also wrote that the company believes the public will no longer have to carry a wallet by 2015. Apparently, PayPal predicts digital currency will be accepted everywhere in the United States, although the Paypal president made no mention of the rest of the world.
PayPal are so confident that they"ve asked five employees in the San Francisco area to use only digital currency for all of their purchases that they might make. Presumably, the payments would be done through the PayPal service but in reality there are variances in the technology that"s used and the devices that allow shops to offer digital payments are yet to be widespread. If PayPal are right in their hopes that would mean consumers would be able to use their digital wallet in a variety of places from a small independent shop to a major supermarket.
Some may believe PayPal"s optimism is misplaced, and that may be the case, but we have previously seen news stories of how mobile phones are being used to make payments. Technology has previously allowed the use of phones to simply touch a device at the store and the phone application would do the rest. More recently, we"ve seen Google launch its own platform, predictably named Google Wallet, that works with MasterCard accounts.
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