I am curious, how will “Samsung Pay” “work alongside 90 percent of mag stripe payments terminals”, the very great majority of which are not NFC and supposedly have no means of receiving a communication other than by the swipe of a magnetic stripe?

Regardless, notwithstanding the very great superiority of the Apple marketing operation, all that hot air surrounding Apple Pay will eventually cool …

Predictions: The MCX consortium’s CurrentC will be still born, if born at all, or will expire soon thereafter; all the hot air surrounding the limited user base of Apple Pay will finally cool; eBay’s clunky “PreyPal” will slowly fade away (along with the eBay Marketplace) except as the merchant account provider of last resort; the carrier-based providers, and all the other payment intermediaries, new and old and riding on the back of the retail banks’ existing systems but not underpinned by a mandated place on some marketplace, may continue hanging on—barely; Bitcoin will remain an idea that remote retail buyers simply aren’t interested in; the new EMV/NFC cards will eventually drag the U.S. out of the payments “Stone Age” and, finally, notwithstanding their atrocious marketing policies, MasterCard’s and Visa’s new online/mobile digital wallets, “MasterPass” and “Visa Checkout” will eventually become as ubiquitous as are now their plastic cards—that you can bank on …