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:
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Smartphones are much easier for users to use and anything this device could do, smartphones could do much better.
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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.
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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.
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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.