Last week I attended two different conferences in Miami Beach related to payments and currency. The first was the Miami Beach Bitcoin Conference, and the second was the Mobile Payments conference. Both events were held in the same venue but that was pretty much the only similarity. As I digested what I’d seen and heard, I came away with a strong and profound feeling that the industry is ripe for disruption. Here’s what I saw and felt.

Let’s start with the Mobile Payments Conference. It was a very small group of tech vendors, payment gateways, networks and processors, and other interested parties. I was at the session for one half day of the two day event, but I can describe it as follows: relatively sparsely attended by long-time payment specialists. The keynote speeches appeared to be presented by mostly sponsoring entities. In the keynote I attended, the speaker held up a chart showing that 94% of people surveyed are willing to pay a fee to transfer money internationally. I know not who was surveyed, by whom, or how many people were in the sample and neither did he – I asked. I thought to myself “Boy, that’s the wrong question. If you’ve got to send money internationally for one reason or another, of course you’re going to be willing to pay, especially if you have no alternative. ” But that was the tone and tenor of the conference. Lots of talk about data security and PCI, but a deep sense of inevitability pervaded the group; a sense of entitlement and surety based on years of being essentially the only games in town. Frankly, even the new mobile payment exchanges, ISIS, MCX and others have a similar sense to them. We’re new, but we’re the same.

That sense of inevitability is one I’ve seen before. The list is long. And it’s one that is ripe for disruption.

And that brings me to the Bitcoin conference. I went into this conference hoping to learn what the heck Bitcoins are and why they matter. Wikipedia was not helpful in this regard. Its entry is fundamentally incomprehensible to a non-technical being. What I found when I arrived at the conference was a venue crammed full with more than 1,000 excited enthusiasts. I mean, full to the rafters. The speakers were passionate, excited, and spoke of both independence and financial opportunity. The demographics skewed to the typical new technology demo – predominantly male, under 40 years old and zealous. Also typical for a new technology, there was a group of venture capitalists looking to see how this thing could be monetized. They participated in a really interesting panel discussion on the topic.

It’s hard to explain what Bitcoin is in one paragraph, but I think I did a decent job in 1,000 words on Forbes.com. So, if you’d like to read it, you can click here. As part of the retail ecosystem, we do need to understand what the heck the things are in a relatively unbiased way. Short strokes, a few retailers, casinos and small businesses have started using it as a form of payment. It’s most interesting to those selling very low margin products. Overstock.com reported $130,000 in Bitcoin sales (800 purchases) the first day it started accepting the currency. Tigerdirect.com is taking Bitcoins as payment, but settles in dollars through Bitpay – the exchange that acts as a payment gateway and processor for many Bitcoin transactions. I’m not clear how the casinos settle, or if they’re amassing Bitcoins themselves (as the CEO of Overstock.com is reportedly doing).

While the Bitcoin currency has been associated with illicit transactions, like those on now-shuttered silkroad.com, the arrest of Charlie Shrem (CEO of a Bitcoin exchange BitInstant), and Robert Faiella, a Bitcoin exchanger last week starts to take the onus off of the currency itself and puts it onto specific individuals. That’s important going forward, as are calls for some level of regulation. The venture capitalists I heard discussing the technology were very clear that some regulations must be in place before big money comes in to invest.

But we can leave that for another day. The important thing to note here is the very, very low fees associated with Bitcoin transactions. It’s an international currency, so there are no fees associated with currency conversion or wire transfers. Bitpay (a Bitcoin payment gateway and processor), will process all the Bitcoin transactions you can eat for up to $3,000 per month. For the short term, Bitpay is making its money on the continued appreciation of the Bitcoin against the dollar (which has been whacky high). I don’t think this model is sustainable, and eventually prices will rise to some degree, but keep one word in mind “Disruption. “

The other things to note about Bitcoin are that it’s exempt from PCI standards, as it doesn’t pass through traditional payment gateways, it is completely encrypted and ‘trustless,’ and the transactions are irrevocable. There’s no one to call to say “Stop that payment! ” Once made, it’s done.

Now, I’m not a Bitcoin advocate, nor am I prophesizing the end of traditional payment gateways. But there are several things worthy of note here: 1) the Target data breach seems to have been the straw that broke the consumer camel’s back on privacy and data security. The notion of “trustless ” is likely to become more interesting to consumers; and 2) retailers know prices are high for payment processing. That’s what spawned the notion of MCX – let’s keep a slice for ourselves. Finally, 3) mobile payments are not gaining the traction retailers and tech providers expected. Consumers just don’t see the benefits.

I’m going to end back where I started: the slide that showed 94% of consumers would be willing to pay to send money internationally. Roll back to 1997. I was a CIO and our POS systems were running SCO Unix. At the time, SCO was owned by Netware (if you’re under 40, none of these words mean a thing to you!) and was dormant. You couldn’t get SCO support on a bet. If someone would have asked me then “Would you pay for SCO support? ” I, and anyone else running the OS would have shouted out “YES “, loudly and proudly. In fact, think I might have paid some usurious prices a couple of times for a SCO consultant.

Fast forward to 1999, and the advent of Google (thanks Tony Caravello, for introducing it to me). Suddenly, I can search for an answer to my SCO problems and get a good response. A reasonably savvy tech person can follow the responses and fix problems when they occur. Heck, I might have even googled up a few, myself. The cost to me? ZERO. And I could watch bemused as SCO the spun-off company started its fruitless life as a glorified patent troll, suing retailers who might be using it. We were too small to go after, and the system ran well enough until it was replaced by my successor, sometime in 2003. In other words, SCO support went from almost priceless to free in a matter of months.

Here we are in 2014. Payment processors are convinced of their inevitability. Consumers are not happy. Retailers believe they are paying too much for too little. What do you think? Is there an opportunity to disrupt the ecosystem entirely? Is there any reason why a billion dollar industry can’t become a half-billion dollar industry while solving a genuine problem? I can’t think of a one. As I said before, the payments industry is ripe for disruption. Make sure you’re asking the right question. Because you may well come up with some very different answers.