In reply to David Evans.

The barriers of which I speak are technical, not regulatory (that's a whole 'nother discussion). Non-traditional payments to date (from PayPal to Dwolla) require the merchant and the consumer to both sign up for the same proprietary wallet. Bitcoin enables users with Wallet A to spend bitcoin at merchants with Wallet B...eg: I can send btc from Coinbase to a merchant who uses Bitpay. Or, I could start a new wallet company for under $10,000 investment and my customers could spend their btc at thousands of merchants on day 1....on Day 1 I have more merchants in my network than does Dwolla after years of effort. Or, I could take my $10,000 startup and be a merchant acquirer and pitch merchants on the 5mm people with $8Bn worth of btc to spend in very few places...and would they like a piece of that. That's more volume than Amex travelers cheuques...more volume than Amex Membership Reward points, more volume than Dwolla users in aggregate. So, very little tech investment to be able to very quickly be in business pitching something with some volume already built-in....and being a price-maker. Option B is to invest more $ and time to be a prepaid card marketer or, spend similar time / $ and simply sell merchants for an ISO...as a price-taker.