In 1969, three men achieved the impossible, landing on the moon. Powered by technology that had, at best, less than 2,000,000 times less ROM memory in a guidance computer than a typical smartphone has today (assuming 8GB ROM). If we think about the processor they used, it sat at something like 100,000 times less than the common phone we all carry. But with all of that in mind, they achieved in a short period, as reminded by JFK when he gave his speech with the now immortal words, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” The technology they built was revolutionary in its day—game-changing.
Go back a little further than 1969, to around 3000 BCE–1000 BCE, and we saw societies introduce commodity money in the likes of gold & silver or cattle, metal coins minted in around 600 BCE, and banknotes in Europe in the 1700s. We continued the evolution from cash to cards by around the 1950s with the Diners Club credit card, the 1970s brought the ATM, and the 80s and 90s (along with fantastic style choices, haircuts and music) saw electronic banking starting to make an appearance. In 1998, PayPal was born, and in 2008, blockchain was ushered into existence, quickly followed in 2009 by Bitcoin’s entry into the market. Sandwiched between these two step changes, when (in my opinion) the revolution really started, the UK introduced “faster payments,” which (arguably) led to the instant-everything era.
So, what do the moon landing and payments do with one another? Well (outside of payments being used to fund the moon landing, which, when adjusted for inflation, amounted to a princely sum of $288.1 billion), it’s the continued advent of technology. Without technology, man wouldn’t have been able to land on the moon. Without technological advances enabling payments to evolve rapidly, we would still be exchanging barley for goods and services in bartering systems. Without computational power, something like blockchain could never have existed—not to mention the resources required to keep Bitcoin running (there’s a whole other story on Bitcoin miners maintaining the “proof of work”).
Now, we cannot write about payments, technology, and advances without talking about AI. We already know we will rely more on AI to identify AI-generated fraud, which is becoming increasingly difficult to spot. With real-time transactions, the money is often gone before fraud is detected (IP regulations dictating a 10-second transaction time mean that with A2A payments, the money is made and immediately available to the recipient). But what if we could push AI use cases even further?
We already have AI trading algorithms (although human oversight is still present—after all, computers arguably have no morals or ethics), but what if we pushed the envelope further and transactions became invisible?
Today, we use tap-and-go technology with cards, phones, and watches. Some well-known organisations launched “go” stores where customers simply enter, fill their baskets, and leave—payment is sorted automatically based on what they took, with no scanning or tapping required. With continued investment in AI, what if AI could detect purchases and charge accounts in real-time, reducing friction? Taking this a step further, what happens when AI introduces real-time, hyper-personalised pricing based on our behaviour and spending patterns, negotiating prices on our behalf?
Daring to look ahead, AI-generated and regulated currencies could emerge, with digital currencies evolving into a future vision where transactions are instantly regulatory-compliant. AI could generate the currency, understand regulations across regions (and cross-border), and correct payments to be compliant in an instant—though, of course, ethical concerns might stand in the way.
So what? As Moore’s Law (which states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years) began to slow in the early 2000s, advances in computing were expected to plateau due to physical limitations. But as with everything, evolution prevails. Enter quantum computing and its ability for “quantum parallelism.” Qubits allow information to exist in both states simultaneously, meaning we can solve complex problems in minutes that would take classical computers years to process. Quantum computing processing capabilities are limited primarily by errors, not by size and speed.
Again—so what? Quantum computing (which gets tricky when we dive into quantum states—ask a theoretical physicist, and you’ll have a long, complicated discussion about string theory and quantum breakthroughs) could, in theory, break the cryptographic protections around Bitcoin and blockchain-based systems. It could unravel blockchain security, disrupt stablecoins, and even take control of AI-generated currencies.
This raises a critical question: With quantum computing’s immense power at our fingertips, how do we ensure it is used responsibly? As someone much smarter than me once said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” That one small step for man could become the giant leap for quantum control.
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