2013-12-02 U.S. Air Force Building Bitcoin Payment Gateway

[row5_seat47]

The United States Air Force has quietly been working on a Bitcoin payment gateway. Through an SBIR or Small Business Innovation Research grant to the Department of Defense, Utica New York based Critical Technologies Inc. has been working on a commercial product for the Air Force since applying for the grant back in 2012 (starting Fiscal Year 2013).

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/8531/u-s-air-force-building-bitcoin-payment-gateway/

[LiteCoinGuy]

actually this isnt news, its all suppositions 

[Mylon]

Well what I read between the lines, is the same what fits his end conclusion.

"it is also possible what they are really after is a better way to feed Snickers bars (YouTube) to their servicemen."

A cheap payment system, that they can fully automate? Lower cost / overhead, more security... who in the army doesn't love that They could even create their own private Armycoin and run it over milnet. (if they keep the system private, which is to be expected. They can regulate it and just peg it one on one with the US Dollar, talk about ease of use )

[TraderTimm]

This is exactly how I thought the smarter banks would try to co-opt the system, by starting their own chain and using their own rules. Perhaps even going so far as to craft different properties that they needed - like in the Army's case - secure transmission of encrypted comms.

Who knows, since Bitcoin has proven that a global decentralized network won't crash and burn with a decent amount of users (not global population, but with a few supernodes, no problem), they're just looking at it as a potential communication/payment medium for their internal accounting.

Interesting developments...