No doubt this will be labelled as "pointless promotion" within the hour and moved to the trash bin, but IMO it's too important not to share. Regardless of the fact that it's something I've been involved with developing, even if it wasn't I'd still make some noise about it.
A critical goal of eMunie has been the ability to perform payments, independent of the Visa and Mastercard networks, on existing EFTPOS terminals that you find in everyday merchant stores. We've worked long and hard on this and finally, as of yesterday, it was achieved.
So whats special about this? There are Bitcoin mobile wallets already that can do that, and Bitcoin debit cards which do the same. The problems though are many:
1. Mobile wallets and debit cards on Bitcoin (and others) all involve a "middle man", who take a hefty chunk of fees for the privilege. Fees for loading the card, fees for spending, fees even if you
don't use the service.
2. Your account with these service providers can be cancelled at any time, and you lose your money. Or your transactions can be censored and rejected at will.
3. They all use the VISA/Mastercard/Other networks, which again means the card can be cancelled, or be subjected to transaction censorship.
Our goal was to create a platform, that aside from a plethora of improvements overall, would also support
Decentralized Debit Cards on existing hardware (which is critical) and not just virtual cards in a mobile phone, but physical ones too (as mass market consumers overall still don't like, nor trust the idea of money in their phone).
When I say decentralized debit cards, what do I mean?
1. They interact directly with the eMunie network (which itself is decentralized) and do not transmit transactions over an intermediary network such as Visa.
2. You are in control of the card, which means no cancellations, no transaction censorship.
3. Using off the shelf hardware costing around $20, you can create your own debit card!
Point number 3 is probably the most important. Anyone with $20 of hardware can create a new debit card, load it with funds, then go to the local store and spend it in the same payment terminal they would their regular bank card.....a libertarians dream!
In fact, here is a video link showing exactly that, with some commentary by me all in under 5 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqE-7R8liMUPlease excuse the shaky camera work, I wanted to do a video that was uncut and raw, which meant a single cut with no editing. I wanted to show that it was possible and that there is no trickery involved with fancy editing, what you see is what you get.
