I have an idea that I believe could change the crypto world. I want to petition to make a Ledger Nano type device that can send and receive ADA and potentially all the other crypto that would be supported in Daedalus.
Think of it like withdrawing cash from your bank account. You would take the ADA out.of.your main wallet and put it in your “cash” wallet (the device). It would be a kind of “warm” storage. You would obviously get the network transfer fees when loading/unloading your device but, everything transfered from device to device would be completely free. Eventually POS terminals could even be created for stores.
I have a few ideas for design… One being to equip the device with the male end of a USB port on one side and female on the other. The make end woukd be the sending side and the female would be the receiving side. I believe this would work great because we could equip the receive side with some sort of key pad support to make typing in sending amounts easier for personal transactions. The POS would be as simple as plug in and approve, like your Visa.
Personally, I don’t have the technical skills to make this happen or the funds to pay someone to make it happen. I’m one of the paycheck to paycheck guys that just happened to stumble onto Cardano with hopes that it could help change my families life. That’s why I decided to bring this idea out in the open forum in hopes to get the community together to get Cardano to fund it. I initially mentioned it in @ADALove grid down thread yesterday but felt like I should give it it’s own thread to get the needed support. I put it in “Developers” because I wanted to make sure the eyes that have the skills to make it happen, see it.
To me it seems like a million dollar idea, especially if we could make it support multiple currencies, but I might be a little biased. What do you think?
In the other thread I didn’t elaborate more on my thoughts because I assumed we would focus on it sometime in the future. Now that you’ve dedicated a thread to this, we can discuss some of the deeper technical issues.
For a little context: In my professional life, I’ve been involved and invested in several payment processing and mobile shopping companies. Back in the mid-1990s, one of our companies was the first to invent and deploy several key technologies that are used by virtually all online payment processors around the world today. I didn’t mention this before because it wasn’t relevant to the use-case we were discussing, but now it’s relevant to give you some context for why I’m making the following points.
When we were discussing this previously, I said it was a good idea for a specific use-case: The grid-down scenario; and for that purpose, the idea would work very well.
However, for generalized crypto cash payments under normal conditions, there are a lot more requirements and it’s not an ideal solution for several reasons:
Smartphones are much easier for users to use and anything this device could do, smartphones could do much better.
Users are already using their phones for P2P payments, including NFC-based payments at POS terminals. So any crypto cash system will need to conform to existing smartphone user habits to enjoy broad user adoption.
The primary reason the Ledger Nano is so popular is because it serves a very specific and simple purpose: secure offline storage. It’s not intended to be a transactional device because the interface is too limited for that. To add the more advanced features that you’re now describing would require a significant engineering effort. And at that point, it becomes a much more complicated cost-benefit analysis because the cost of production for such a device–with an unvalidated and potentially skeptical market–might not be justified relative to simply creating an app for existing smartphones.
Charles has mentioned several times that the team is already working with another device manufacturer to build a hardware wallet, which will hold multiple currencies for cold storage; and he said future versions will likely have offline crypto cash payment capabilities, based on the trusted chips that I mentioned in the other thread. He knows that such a device must be more sophisticated than the Ledger Nano, which means, the team is already aware of the possibility of creating a device that substantially fulfills the generalized use-case you’re describing.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to pursue it, and maybe others will have some good ideas to counter-balance my points above, but the real-world implementation and cost-benefit analysis is much more complicated than it might seem.
What do you think?