How could social payments reshape our daily habits? Cointelegraph speaks to Canadian Bitcoiner Kyle Kemper about the Social Wallet, a nonprofit that hopes to digitize every aspect of services.
Kyle Kemper, Social Innovator and Founder, says:
“Social payments are a whole new paradigm in finance. Also think about all the sites you use: fold, purse, coinbase, bit gold, kraken, online banking, social media, etc. - ultimately you'll be able to leverage their systems, create accounts, and derive value from them without needing to remember a million different URLs and UN/PW combos. With digital identity plus money, we can reshape logins, checkouts, brick and mortar stores. It’s a concept called seamless experience.”
“Smart” restaurants without paper receipts
Kyle Kemper: I've worked in restaurants as a server and a bartender. The worst part of the experience is the bill, it ruins nights. In the Social Wallet future, you will be able to go into a restaurant, check-in from your phone, and order from the server or via your phone. They’ll see you in the system, can add things to your bill, and check if you have any allergies, which would automatically notify the kitchen with the order.
When you want to leave, just press pay on your phone, leave a positive or negative review on Yelp, and then the payment is split fairly between the server, the kitchen, the bartender, the restaurant, and the government through tax. There would be no more businesses acting as custodians for tax money, which is a massive headache and liability for businesses.
POS/ERP makers would build apps for Social Wallet, so when employees get to work, they clock-in, and at the end of the shift, they get paid. Everything is stored on digital ledgers, making accounting jobs something a script can do. We eliminate paper receipts and the need for printers and clunky dated hardware.
Full wallet digitalization
KK: Loyalty cards get kept in your digital wallet and are automatically associated. People can opt-in and get paid/receive discounts to share valuable data with organizations/research firms. Your health records, genome records, driver’s license number, voting tokens, access keys, shoe size, eye prescription, etc. access tokens can all be stored in the wallet.
The scope is huge and we can get there pretty fast all things considering. The ability for people to come together and solve gigantic societal problems is available using all the technology at our disposal. We don't need to be together in a physical location, we are where we want to be.
Central banks and private banks are going to be moving to crypto in the coming months and years. They will be making their systems digital and interoperable.
This will further increase seamless transitioning between systems. I have a paper prepared that advises central banks how to insure themselves and their country's' financial system against bitcoin's rise, but also the fiat collapse. It just has not been the time to release it as it needs to be done the right way.
Security issues
KK: The app starts as a local bitcoin client and we're building a backend to associate your phone contacts to users. We will not store your keys and we're likely looking at a BIP39 mnemonic as the recovery tool for the v1 release.
I personally hate mnemonics and we'll work out something better soon. Mnemonics are scary to the average person, and we can't try and change their behaviour because it will hurt adoption.
As we grow we'll have more experts providing more input and building security apps, multi-sig, sentinel networks, etc. to make it customizable, redundant, and uber-secure.
Future of Bitcoin and funding opportunities
KK: I worry the bitcoin network won't be able to handle the stress of the next wave, but I have hope because, given the nature of the network, it can be agile and address problems as they come up.
‘Liquid’ seems promising, and would stand to take a lot of the trader activity off the primary chain, which currently represents something like 70% of traffic.
$21 Million is what I see as the lifetime requirement to bring social wallet to the world. That is not to say we can’t make immense progress without significant funding, however.
Feasibility of Social Wallet
Experts in the Bitcoin space have questioned the feasibility of such a project, however.
Dominik Zynis, Communications Directors at Wings, said to Cointelegraph:
“I just don’t know if I get the premise of wallets being free, since it doesn’t match the physical wallet analogy (i.e. physical wallets cost money). However, I can definitely see there being a place for a non-profit to provide wallet software, and for the majority of people a free wallet which meets standard security requirements should be good enough for day to day spending. He [Kemper] says, “Is it right to pay money to move money?” but Bitcoin transactions today cost money to move BTC”
Alena Vranova, Founder of SatoshiLabs, also added, “I'd say any good quality service needs to be paid for. The only reason for a free service I'd see is to get a mass of users and then monetize.”