Bitcoin 2 - Mobile Payments

My 'adventure' into Bitcoin has revealed a whole new world of virtual crypto currency. If you look around you also realise that mobile money itself is quite controversial.

From a technology perspective this should be pretty simple. You have a smartphone with an app and then, instead of taking a wallet, you just have an app that just transfers money when you want to buy something. Easy!

The first hurdle is that too often not every smartphone platform has an 'app'. Your bank app is usually there for an iPhone and current Android versions. My Windowsphone is often not covered. Secondly no one has a payment system that works everywhere. In the UK there is Barclays Pingit, Paym, Paypal mobile payments and more....  Even baker Greggs has a payment card that requires pre-loading money. It has absolutely no advantage over using cash.

In the US there is Google Wallet, Isis and more.

The big barriers are not technology it is rather the perceived potential market. Internet companies want the billions that will pass through mobile payments, tech companies want it, banks want it, so all of them have different standards. They all want paying too  - so a percentage paid by merchants for micropayments mean that micropayments are too expensive for retailers. The customer wants to give up needing to keep cash but cash remains the cheapest form of payment for the retailer.

NFC was supposed to herald micropayments and contactless payments. However since Apple haven't built in an NFC chip the market for adoption, particularly in the USA, has been reduced. I have followed the BBC technology correspondent on a few occasions using mobile payments and he has pretty much confirmed to me that you can't ditch your wallet.

The most successful mobile payment system in the world is in East Africa. it only uses codes and SMS text messaging. Nothing nearly as sophisticated as the modern smartphone.

So back to Bitcoin. It turns out that having a tenth of a Bitcoin I can't figure out how to spend is normal in the mobile payment space. Almost no-one really accepts mobile payments in a convenient consumer friendly way. Bitcoin isn't unique.

Link

BBC - Rory tries mobile payment

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Powershell Symlink to Onedrive

Image
I have more than one PC. To be precise, and overly pedantic, 3 Windows 10 laptops. All are slightly different and of various ages. One I use with a Windows 10 Insider Build to keep up with the next thing coming down the pipeline. On each, I do a bit of Powershell . Powershell is the latest generation of Windows command line tools. The Linux enthusiast would look down on the Windows command line of whatever generation but Microsoft has always provided command line tools. In the early days MSDOS was a command line OS. It did little but create directories (folders), copy, move or delete files. It ran “command.com” which some said was just a basic file system manager and way of loading programs into memory. It wasn’t difficult to disagree. Developers brought out alternatives to this such as 4DOS , literally “for dos”, by JP Software . They also produced 4NT, which enhance the Windows NT command processor and 4OS2. The latter was for the IBM OS2 Operating System of the late 80s and ea
Read more

Being progressive rather than universal

Image
Microsoft was not short of ambition for its tiled interface and One Windows strategy . Microsoft was doing what no other tech firm had done - uniting mobile to desktop/laptop PCs in one experience. Apple had two OSs available - IOS for phone/tablet and OSX for its desktop/laptop users. They were different and had different interfaces. Google had two OSs - Android for phone/tablet and ChromeOS for its Chromebook devices. Of course, even One Windows doesn't mean exactly the same OS but it does mean components have such similarity that the interface appears the same to users and, with little modification, apps can run on all platforms. Unfortunately, the app platform UWP (Universal Windows Platform) was hobbled from day one. Microsoft had a poor quality application store, ever-changing developer tools and standards and a Store that only worked (on the PC side) for Windows 8 and latterly Windows 10. While people used legacy versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and XP t
Read more

Identity as the new security boundary

 Not so long ago a PC was safe behind a firewall. The idea was that the physical infrastructure of a network would be enough. Anti-virus and anti-malware products sat on PCs to protect users. Then hybrid working came along. Digital nomads who could connect to networks from anywhere. New startups had users connecting to web based applications. People were bringing their own devices, tablets, phones, projectors and so on into the workplace. Security has now started looking at people. Microsoft call this zero-trust. You don’t just trust someone because they can login. You have systems that secure identity itself. There are three steps to identity security.  1.The credentials that give you authorisation. For most people this is an account identity and password. Often the identity is an email address or some public identity. This leaves the account secured by password. The strength and complexity of the password protecting authentication. 2. Authorization is the next step. What you can a
Read more