It’s the best thing since the invention of coins, checks or credit cards… In fact, it could make all previous forms of currency obsolete.

My wife and I recently traveled from our home in West Virginia to St. Louis, Missouri. Jen and I drove more than a thousand miles, spent six nights in a hotel, ate however many meals and did some shopping. We each have a debit card, a credit card and a gas card, and Jen has a few store cards. We were gone a week, and I came home with the same ten $50 bills I’d gotten at the bank before we left.

It dawned on me how seldom I have any physical currency in my wallet — usually only when I travel. It’s certainly not because I go without any of the things I need or want; it’s because I simply don’t need to carry cash.

I do, of course, need my smartphone. And Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is onto something with its idea to put the two things together.

“In the past few thousand years, the way we pay has changed just three times — from coins, to paper money, to plastic cards. Now we’re on the brink of the next big shift.”

#-ad_banner-#That’s Google’s introduction to Google Wallet. I couldn’t have said it any better.

Simply put, this is “the next big thing” that will lead to the death of debit cards and cash.

Google Wallet is part of a trend away from cash that started with the check, continued with the credit card and has since proliferated exponentially with the rise of the debit card.

Debit cards were invented in 1978 and went national in 1984. By 1998, they had eclipsed paper checks, which are dying as a form of payment. In 1995, 25% of transactions were electronic, according to the Electronic Payments Coalition. By 2002, cash was a minority player, as more than half of all transactions were electronic. Industry projections suggest that by 2014, 64% of purchases will be made without cash.

The ubiquitous search giant is working to build a global network of merchants that will allow hundreds of millions of customers to forget cash and cards altogether.

Instead, consumers will use technology like Google Wallet to tap their phones on a special device that will automatically bill them for the purchase.

It’s revolutionary concepts like these that I profile regularly in my Game-Changing Stocks advisory. My job as Chief Investment Strategist of that publication is to help you find the stocks that are primed to change the baseline assumptions for an industry, potentially changing the way we live our lives — and deliver triple-digit growth potential in the process.

To identify these groundbreaking concepts one has to be forward thinking… and you have to go out on a limb.

— Who would have thought 10 years ago most of us would have tiny computers in our pocket or purse at nearly every waking moment? Then Blackberry and Apple came to the party and smartphones have caught on like wildfire, making enormous sums of money for early investors.

— Would you have believed a decade ago that Blockbuster would now be bankrupt? And that it would be done by a tiny upstart called Netflix that delivered movies via mail and later stream movies over the Internet, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to watch a movie without leaving the house?

I could go on for pages. But the important point is that I’d bet you wouldn’t have thought half of these ideas were possible a little more than a decade ago. That’s why to find the most lucrative potential investments, you must have an open mind.

I think Google is onto something big with the Google Wallet technology. But the simple fact is that Google’s days of heady gains are largely behind it. That’s why it’s not my top pick for mobile payments technology. Instead, the likely winner is a company most people have never heard of — NXP Semiconductors (Nasdaq: NXPI).

If you’re a longtime StreetAuthority Daily reader, you’ve heard me talk about this company before. In fact, my Game-Changing Stocks readers have been profiting from it since June of 2012.

As you can see from the chart above, I first recommended NXP at $23.57. Since then, it’s returned nearly 150%.

To recap, NXP builds the special near-field communications chips that allow phones and mobile devices to transmit purchase information securely. And Google Wallet is not the only dance on this company’s card. It’s not only delivering the chip for the Google Wallet, which will initially be deployed through the Nexus S 4G on the Sprint network, the company also has inked a deal to put NFC technology in Android smartphones. Apple is also a customer.

Keep in mind, this is a company that’s also developing a lot of other smart, game-changing technology. In fact, it holds the No. 1 or No. 2 rank in all the other industries in which it competes. The company offers a vast patent portfolio. It owns the intelligence at the edge of the network, and is poised to profit from its discoveries for years, either by manufacturing itself or by licensing the technology to others.

In fact, there are so many possibilities with this technology, it’s simply too much to cover in one issue. So I’ve put together a special report, “The Death of Debit Cards,” which I’m giving away as a special benefit to new Game-Changing Stocks subscribers. You can learn how to access it here.

Bottom line, mobile payments is an impending revolution in how the world transacts business. And when I say “the world” I mean “the world.” This is a technology deployable not only in rich Western countries but also in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, potentially attracting not only wealthy U.S. and European iPhone and Android aficionados, but also billions of unbanked customers doing trillions of dollars in business. We’ve already seen triple-digit returns with NXP, but there’s still room to run.

P.S. —  The mainstream media doesn’t cover groundbreaking opportunities like mobile payments — that is, until it’s too late. They’ll tell you all about a discovery once it comes out — but they don’t look ahead to see where the next one is coming from.

There are plenty more innovative ideas we’ve been uncovering in Game-Changing Stocks — including trends with the potential to revolutionize our lives that hold the potential for early investors make a killing. I’ve identified five game-changers with triple-digit upside potential in a recent report, available at absolutely no cost to you. To learn more about these game changers before the rest of the crowd finds them, follow this link.