Google may offer an online walletEver since I read Cryptonomicon, I've always been fascinated with the idea of having a currency which is entirely outside of a governmental control. In truth, I haven't really thought through exactly what this would do to the stability of the world, but I'm also not exactly sure how different it is today. If Visa decided to change their currency from dollars to sea shells, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me. 90% of what I buy anyway is electronically exchanged, and I do not make decisions based currency exchange rates (at least in the US... if I'm overseas, this might change things a bit).Anyhow, with Google selling nothing (except ads), this seems like the first real step to having something like this happen. Actually, I'm surprised that Ebay hasn't done something like this already. If you do nothing but trade within the Ebay universe, you have no need for dollars. As far as Google's likelihood of success... it's an interesting play, but outside of ads, I'm not sure how big they could get without signing up some huge retailers.
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