Post
Topic
Board Project Development
Re: IMHO one major problem of BTC and how to fix it
by
qwk
on 18/12/2013, 14:09:08 UTC
1. When was the last time you payed something with mobile payment from your phone
Almost every Bitcoin meetup, and I tend to attend them a lot Wink

2. What is the ration of you paying with your card/phone
20/1 ratio now, but uphill for the phone.

3. Do you really believe that a cellphone is more secure than a card?
For your use case, definitely, and by a great margin.
I don't give my phone to somebody to pay. I do give out my card, though. That's highly insecure.

4. Do you really believe that paying via cellphone stops people from stealing your data?
There is no "absolute" security. Relatively, though, you're much safer from theft with your phone than with your cards.

5. Do you really believe you will still be able to make anonymous payments via mobile payment when compared to a card which would be more anonymous?
Why would the card be more anonymous? My phone is anonymous "enough" for everyday use. When it comes to protection from identification by the NSA or whoever... well, I don't actually have a need for that. And there are few who do.
If and when I need that kind of security, I wouldn't rely on day-to-day technology anyway.

And yeah, mobile payment is a trend and will be the future. However, living in a world where the "tech scene" still talks about how big ecommerce will be and why you should add responsiveness to your homepage, i don't believe that this future is somewhere so close as all people mean it is. Sure, there are some hip trendy stores accepting it, but thats not a majority and i doubt the majority will accept this so soon.
The point is: a phone can do whatever you can do with your card. The logistics for equipping millions of users with a special card are way above anything a small community like ours can handle. The logistics to just churn out a useful android app and getting users to install that on their already existing smartphones are a lot less complicated. In fact, there already are a lot of wallet apps and a number of users who downloaded them.

Getting merchants to accept a new card will require new hardware on their side or legacy payment providers to update their software, which they won't, because it would damage their business models. Basically, neither is likely to happen anytime soon. Getting merchants to install an app on their respective smartphones or install some software on their office computers is a lot easier.

In the end, it all boils down to this: for a "card" solution, you need a lot of new hardware both on the clients' as well as the merchants' sides. For a smartphone solution, all you need to do is convince clients and merchants of the benefits of some small apps.