Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

> Why is this significant in your eyes

A few reasons.

First the company. The fact that startups have realised a future of cash involving different hybrid physical technologies is important. Activity in this space shows that people take cash and its unique social properties seriously and will invest in it.

Secondly, the advance in cash technologies generally. Super thin "smart textiles" open up a new world for cash. If you think about it the technology that already goes into bank notes is amazing, but it's mostly aimed at anti-counterfeit. We had a brainstorm over here to few months ago to talk about hybrid physical cash. Ideas like using e-ink to display the current stored value, "paper" notes that could be debited, zero knowledge proofs to show the bearer has funds and title while both parties remain anonymous, ways to turn GNU Taler into hybrid cash, "contactless cash"... and much more.

Lastly, while I am not a fan of Bitcoin for environmental reasons, I think that visible/tangible forms of cryptocurrency are an important piece of the jigsaw in bringing widespread acceptance and usage of next generation cryptocurrencies, because they have important social implications for freedom and democracy.

As it is, it may not be a success (the phone verification is already a show-stopper for me precisely because I want digital cash that works independently of smartphones) - but first movers lay the groundwork for the future, so I'll be watching this.

I'm not sure if your first point is a necessity for other perhaps good ideas.

They will either not make those notes or only do one batch due to it just being a novelty in it's current state.

For me it feels like 'blind entrepreneur + we want to ship + we need to ship for more funding'.

I would even like to support weird ideas if it wouldn't promote Bitcoin usage :-(

I think your second point is more interesting: why do you think this digital to analog transition will be a thing?

Even in Zimbabwe they already have 50% smartphones and those are only getting cheaper and cheaper and will continue to flood the market.

My future imagines a smartphone only world for everything. From money, to house and car key. Germany now allows your passport or driver license on your phone.

I think it will be much more interesting how we can make smartphone theft obsolete and phone recovery easy. Like how do I regain my phone's state when I loose it while traveling.

> I think your second point is more interesting: why do you think this digital to analog transition will be a thing?

It's not digital to analogue so much as changing forms of digital technology. Digital technology can exist in many different ways. For example bus tickets in Budapest used a matrix of holes punched out of paper a grid because a brilliant Hungarian mathematician worked out a way to make digital combinations in rows and columns allow multiple journeys but allow an inspector to see if the passenger had punched their ticket by adding the holes in some row and column. Like a primitive QR code that's a digital technology.

A single function "digital banknote" that uses practically zero-cost static patterning would hopefully operate much like a paper note, with added anti-counterfeit benefits; I could put it in drawer for 10 years, pass it to a friend as a gift, no batteries to charge, no network to go down, no virus or malware to corrupt it, no remote kill-switch built in by MegaGigaCom.

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