The last few days I have been listening to keynotes attending a European payments congress in Vienna, Austria. Among many issues presented against the use of the bitcoin - and [...]
One of the main gripes by skeptics with bitcoin is its volatility, next to the fact that the “issuer” is not controlled by regular democratic structures. By linking the bitcoin [...]
Snapchat and Square recently announced “Snapcash”. This service enables to exchange money directly between two persons (so called P2P: person to person) right from the Snapchat app prompt line. At [...]
Mintchip and cryptocurrcies urge us to better understand how money and payments relate. We have taken both for granted as separate topics; but they are like two sides of the same coin. Mintchip can provided useful insights in existing payment practices.
Walking to the office this morning it struck me that the evolution of (physical) currency in relation to payments could show us the long term development of digital money as well: step by step the currency has been developing until at a certain moment in time the transaction will be done directly between the payer and the payee.
The removal of the middle man function in an exchange based on the bitcoin protocol does not automatically lead to the disappearance of the companies (and their interests) performing these today. The middle man function will slowly but surely erode with the advent of the bitcoin protocol, the middle man of today (parties) will be the gate(way)keepers of tomorrow.
Looking at a wallet based payment chain (P2P) the central pivot point is the wallet itself. The wallet needs to have the values available either in the wallet or immediately on call by a service provider. Euro’s – or any other currency for that matter – could be provided by a gateway provided per bank based on the PAAS conception.
(4 minutes reading time) Basically we only know a few things about Clinkle. Firstly it is a payments start-up based in San-Francisco promising “something that’s fundamentally different from everything else [...]
(3 min. read) Yesterdays post dealt with MintChip, the new Canadian digital currency based on a secure element on a chip to make payments. The novelty of this scheme is [...]
(4 min. read) FinExtra today covers the introduction of the MintChip in Canada: “Royal Canadian Mint demos digital currency.” Questions arise: why are we talking currency here? what is “digital [...]
The payments landscape is characterised by profound fragmentation, getting worse everyday. In payments, especially in Europe, regulators and banks have successfully tried to prevent fragmentation for decades. But the spirit [...]
