I find it crazy that making a payment requires giving your full details. Using a credit card is less writing a cheque, more handing over a chequebook and saying "help yourself".
I dream of a payment system where payment generates some token, which the intended recipient can redeem, perhaps bearer ones for casual transactions, with support for periodic payments, revoking existing tokens or placing per-token limits.
Well, that was a rabbithole. I learned that (BME - Bolsa y Mercados Espanoles - Spanish stock market) is owned by a Swiss company. It blows my mind that countries sell off such important infrastructure, even if in this case to a friendly country.
It’s a common marketing point but people aren’t using blockchains because they cost more, take longer, and have no fraud protection. If someone steals my credit card, I’ll likely lose nothing other than some mild inconvenience updating numbers - and I don’t even need to do that with the modern systems like Apple Pay which use unique per-merchant identifiers.
That makes quite the contrast with the large sums routinely and irrecoverably stolen from blockchain users. If you want people to buy your random hashes, spend your time unbreaking the system instead of marketing it.
> If someone steals my credit card, I’ll likely lose nothing other than some mild inconvenience updating numbers
You might not lose money when someone steals your credit card, but someone does: either your bank or the merchant will suffer a fraud loss.
Consumer fraud protections with regards to credit cards are necessary because credit cards are fundamentally insecure technology and would be unusable if issuers didn't take on so much of the fraud risk themselves.
> and I don’t even need to do that with the modern systems like Apple Pay which use unique per-merchant identifiers.
Apple Pay is a big improvement over standard credit card technology. It's also closed and proprietary, and requires special equipment to use, on both the merchant side and the consumer side.
> spend your time unbreaking the system instead of marketing it.
Are you criticizing me for writing this comment on HN because I am not at this very moment writing code? In your mind, people can't even talk about a project they may be interested in or working on until the project is finished?
> If you want people to buy your random hashes
Are you sure you are not confusing stablecoins and cryptocurrencies? These are very different things. Stablecoins are transferrable sovereign currency obligations the balances of which are recorded on a blockchain.
Stablecoin tech can be used to allow consumers and merchants to interact with any type of monetary account as might otherwise be embodied by a debit or credit card, with similar business terms.
> That makes quite the contrast with the large sums routinely and irrecoverably stolen from blockchain users.
No doubt blockchain security needs to be substantially improved. It will happen, though!
I dream of a payment system where payment generates some token, which the intended recipient can redeem, perhaps bearer ones for casual transactions, with support for periodic payments, revoking existing tokens or placing per-token limits.
One day perhaps...