The SET system is scheduled to be in use later this year throughout the net. And net-based credit card purchasing is only the beginning. Electronic money, ecash, is on the way. At first people will be wary, careful and conservative about using a substitute for paper money and paper checks. But, probably within months, the convenience, speed and security of the new currencies will lead to their widespread use, first in business and, quickly, with consumers.
Ubiquity is what's needed for emoney to work, worldwide.
That means that various forms of emoney have to be made easy to use, secure and routinized so that usage will spread. What's happening now is a much faster version of what happened around the general acceptance of the computer as a useful tool in our society. First computers were scarce and those in use were devoted to only a rarefied priesthood. Now, PCs are becoming appliances and being sold to an expanding home market, just as Net PCs begin their march to market, where they will be joined by Net TVs, television sets with computer innards. Emoney has been around and used by the banking and financial industries for decades.