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Cell Phone Currency Exchange Nodes
Been thinking about banks a lot again lately and have been revisiting some of my research last year about alternative currency systems. Why don’t we already have the ability to pay one another with our mobile phones (um, not that I have one, but I’m just saying)? If you’re going to have to hook your identity and credit card to the damn thing, it should at least work for you in whatever way you need it. And if a cell phone is acting as a regulator of person-to-person communication, then money only makes sense to be grafted on top of that, because exchange of value is the essence of communication.
The Ripple Monetary System may be old news to some of you alt.currency freaks, but here’s a refresher from Wikipedia:
The core idea of Ripple is that it should be possible to route payments through an open, arbitrary trust network, similar to how the internet routes packets of data through an open, arbitrary computer network. The advantages of such a system would be that it wouldn’t be reliant on a small decision-making body at the center to set monetary policy for the entire nation; instead, it would be set in a more democratic fashion by all participants, and in theory be more responsive to regional and community needs. There would be no need for a tightly-regulated institutional trust hierarchy to control the behaviour of those participants near the center: like the internet, but unlike the existing global monetary system, the Ripple network would be designed to weather the collapse of a large number of its nodes.
Of course, I wouldn’t trust a cell phone provider to secure my financial transactions for me, given the typically abyssmal level of customer service those monoliths tend to offer. But it would be cool to graft an open system like RipplePay onto a non-proprietary cell phone system, or some other open device which the consumer carries with them. And then there are the non-conventional uses I was talking about last year, where we could use systems like this to circumvent bank fees altogether. The complexity of the subject is staggering, and that’s probably the real reason we don’t have these types of systems available to us - yet. The market, I believe, will eventually demand it.
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- Church unleashes cell-phone jamming technology
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- Prev: I Heart Banks!
- Next: “And AT&T Will Bring It To You”
September 4th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Maybe the problem here would be that cellphones are fairly easy to hack?
If you could hack into a phone, put a bunch of “money” on it, and then transfer it to a network of phones all over the world, little bit here, little bit there, back and forth throughout the network, it’d probably be pretty hard to track it all.
Or, alternatively, just put a little bit on money on the phone when you need it, and hope it goes unnoticed.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
And that’s bad how? I have a right to privacy…
September 5th, 2008 at 9:38 am
It’s generally bad for the economy if someone can just create money on their own. Although, that’s basically what the government’s doing right now with the housing loan crisis.
Were someone to monkey around with the 1’s and 0’s on their cellphone to show a larger balance than they actually had, and then filter that balance through a network of other cell phone accounts under different names, the new fake money would get lost in the system. If this happened even just a few times, and became widely known, people would likely loose faith in the system and stop using it.
Tracking this new fake money was just an off-the-cuff way of trying to solve the problem, the same way bank robbers can be tracked down by Treasury numbers (or whatever it’s called) on the bills they stole, or identity thieves by their credit card purchases.
September 5th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
[…] This is clipped from a comment “ian” made on a post of mine from yesterday. It’s generally bad for the economy if someone can just create money on their own. […]