I don't think most normal people see "without banks" as a feature. Indeed, banks have already been peering with each other on transaction-clearing since forever, and I don't think it would take much for the EU to mandate a particular set of common APIs and maybe some entry criteria that allow increasingly smaller players access to the already-existing framework.

All of this seems a lot easier and cheaper than bitcoin's distributed ledger.

> I don't think most normal people see "without banks" as a feature.

The other day I walked into a shop where I couldn't pay by card because the banks didn't provide the service to them. Users don't see "without banks" as a feature, but businesses will. It will reduce their fees and their dependency to the whole industry.

Fair, but how many small businesses who are unable or unwilling to set up a payment terminal will be able to maintain the infrastructure needed to participate in a distributed consensus network?

There will still be an intermediary to whom the small business will pay fees for a turnkey solution. And absolutely those fees would be lower in a world where anyone can participate and compete on them. But that's definitely not the world we live in just yet, and even if/when it arrives, I don't think anyone at the retail level (either the consumer or the storefront) will have an appreciably different experience from what they have today.

EDIT: Just adding also, clearing times is the other huge barrier. Obviously no retail environment can tolerate a transaction delay of more than a few seconds, so the other function of the intermediary would be to manage that reality, by some combination of pre-clearing transactions for customers who look safe (classical CC fraud detection where de-anonymizing would be a key component), or maybe a pre-paying scheme (which ends up sounding a lot like a bank debit card).

If you see something like the CryptoEuro taking off, doesn't it naturally follow that there would be a cryptocurrency that would take off that was global, and not issued by any individual country?

Not really. I would find a way of transferring "cash" that's tied to my local currency far more useful on a day to day basis than one that fluctuates when measured against it.

Most people don't really need or want to take on foreign exchange rate risks.

To each their own.