NFC has gotten a lot of hype lately, primarily for its role in facilitating electronic payments with your smartphone.

I'm more interested in how it can enable the electronic propagation of the end product of the transaction: the receipt. In an ideal world such transaction records include not only the payment itself, but an itemized inventory of exactly what the transaction entailed, communicated using industry standard identifiers such as UPC identifiers and standardized units. NFC is simply the beachhead for such a more general transaction communications platform.

I'd like to see government make this mandatory for businesses over a certain size. The government loves additional data sharing points like this — even where it doesn't directly gather the data — as it provides checks and balances that can be used to find evidence of tax evasion. If the cryptographically-signed, itemized purchases for an expense report claim from business A don't mesh up with the sales records of business B, closer scrutiny is inevitable.

Aside from the obvious benefit to corporate purchase tracking, from an end-consumer perspective wouldn't it be ideal to have an itemized list of everything you've purchased, in detail? Given that we're in the era when Groupon-style virtual coupon-clipping is now cool, this would enable purchase optimizations, running your history through mining tools to provide optimization hints and to encourage more vigorous competition in the industry.

You would have saved $57.65 last month if you did {XYZ}.

It would root out and highlight loss leaders and non-optimal commerce.

The 40" LED television you purchased at BigBox Retailer was a good deal, but the $98 Vanilla Brand HDMI cable they convinced you to purchase was higher priced than at 98% of retailers.

It would allow for more enlightened, fact-based personal finances, which is an area where fantasy usually dominates.

Some would opt out of this, which is why I imagine it would be voluntary. Personally I'm not too concerned whether Big Brother knows how many waffles or cartons of chocolate milk we've purchased in the month, but I can see use for the data.