Bitcoin Forum

First post ever: I've had bitcoin on my radar since early 2012 but I really only have a layman's understanding of what is possible.
I'm interested in location-based potential of bitcoin and wanted to know if there is a wallet or some kind of app that could be designed to let users "detect" other nearby users and send money to their public keys. Is this already possible?

http://www.quickcoin.co/nearby

P.S. IIRC, I saw another app which has similar concept but it is more like a game(similar to coinding). I can't find the link now!

Thanks for the quick reply, Muhammed Zakir. The game-related aspect sounds interesting. Let me know if you recall any other details.

It might be a tall order, but would anyone be able to articulate the bird's eye pseudocode for the sort of functionality involved in sending bitcoin based on location?

I was recently trying out a bunch of Android wallets... I noticed HiveWallet (https://www.hivewallet.com/) had something of the sort. They call it "Waggle" and it detects other Hive users that are nearby. Mycelium has a option to look nearby for buyers/sellers I think - but that's a little different. I haven't actually used either one, and I suspect other wallets may do something similar too.

Why would you even want this? I suspect there will be all sorts of different wallets with all sorts of features in the future. I think they need to add more security features.

This could be very interesting for merchants. There could be something on a wallet that rang a notification when you were nearby some store accepting Bitcoin...

Adding to the OP's question... is there something similar to what I mentioned?

Perfect for people that want to rob you! Find some nice decently filled wallets, locate the person and rob them.. ;) I wouldnt want this personally.

i second this

Seriously...if you have something like this, they have your address, which means they can possibly track your funds, unless you use a new address every time like you should.

It's a feature that you can turn on only when you need to use it. Come on, not all convenience is doom and gloom.

That's true, unfortunately.
It reminds me of a post by another member not long ago about a person being robbed for their Bitcons.

You don't seem to understand how bitcoin works.


No.


No.


No.

There is absolutely no reason for such a wallet to tell anyone what addresses you have that have received any bitcoins.  The wallet would simply generate an empty address and use that address for this service.  As soon as ANY bitcoins were received at the address, it would generate a new empty address and immediately start using it.

This could be done with some sort of short range wireless transmission that other wallets could be created to receive (such as bluetooth), or it could be done by a third party service using the GPS information from the wallets to identify when two wallets were in proximity of each other.