I have been fascinated with the way Dent protocol is reaching out and making it easy to purchase Dent without requiring the services of a day to day exchange. The dent tokens are purchased and deposited straight into the user’s wallet and are ready to use.
If people are going to use ADA in the future to pay their bills and make purchases, at some point, we will need a similar method for people to acquire their ada without having to learn the technical complexities of placing orders on the exchange. Is Cardano looking at doing something similar to Dent in the future?
Secondly, while the DENT system I described, looks appealing, there is still one more hurdle. If we are talking of the unbanked, we have to consider people that transact in cash, they have no credit card facilities, how do we hope to get these people to migrate their cash from under the pillow to the exchange?
Would love to hear your insights, and specifically how Cardano hopes to tackle this issue.
DENT does look a bit interesting, but I would hope most/all of the in-ecosystem identity related tools and features would have a strong privacy protections approach in general.
I think the bigger question and one that interests me very much is related to personal data ownership. We know that many of the current big-data players are just mining everyone’s data for free games and eye candy. If we could only turn that around and have some sort of data commons that 1) implements privacy/ownership of personal identity and other data and 2) has one or more data markets for production of value based on that data. In such a system it should be possible to pay people for at least some activities that produce data that realizes some value in the data market.
Such a system may even provide a foundation of a universal basic income based on the value of data collectively produced.
Apps and systems that produce value through their basic operations are going to be one of the more important parts of the digital ecosystems. It represents the creation of value within the system that wouldn’t have been possible without the system. All the tools of the traditional financial system also have this character, and we see increasing productivity with time, but the system also has produced grossly asymmetric distribution.
It isn’t clear what features digital assets need to help with the distribution problem. I don’t think the currency system fixes this problem, but it does give us some tools. The tools will reach them as soon as practical solutions for their context exists. This is why the way they are training people from unbanked places to implement these solutions is a great way to reach them. The public will snap up the tools to use if they are built right for the context. It costs people so much to transact in these places that there is really no competition to the new services.
Thanks for your response. You raised a different issue of data mining. In my opinion I think Cardano will be overstretching, by going that route. There are already several protocols that are specialising in data gathering and rewarding contributors for their data. A case in point is Ocean protocol.
My concern is about how exactly do we reach the unbanked if they don’t have bank accounts to enable on boarding.
Since Cardano should excel at cross-currency transactions, it shouldn’t be hard to have contracts that connect them. I totally agree that there are and should be specialty currencies related to data mining. I will take a peak at Ocean too. I find the Singularity.Net concept interesting if it bears fruit.
I’m just saying that it is critical that the privacy and ownership issues are addressed well, and that will be to a pretty large extent based on governance. In the long run, I expect currencies to live and die on whether they can implement effective governance.
You are raising some great points, but I still don’t see how they address the issue of onboarding the unbanked, perhaps I am the one misunderstanding the meaning of “unbanked” in the crypto sphere.
Sorry, I didn’t explicitly connect this part. You can pay people in a (social media type) system currency. That currency could become a local unit of exchange just because they are convenient.
Remember that all of the “unbanked” are not in tech. backwaters where internet access is hard to come by. Even so, the new tools would drive the network improvements pretty quickly if they work in the local contexts.
There is a lot of wealth flow in these communities, just they don’t get to access much of it.
I see where you are going, and it makes good sense. Someone was also telling me about the mobile money transfers that are facilitating payments in countries like Zimbabwe and Kenya and South Africa. So people are having their money stored in these mobile phone wallets just like crypto.
I guess there will have to be some kiosks, where these unbanked customers can go and top up their mobile wallets by paying their hard currencies to facilitate adoption.
Just came across another currency that is related. The medium article was also about providing some sort of basic income. Turns out I also know someone on their “team” page, so I’ll have to try and get more of an inside scoop.
Dent coin is an absolute disgrace.U could not make a worse investment. The developers dump billions of their own rubbish coins to fund their own agenda without the slightest interest in investors hard earned money.While the project seems appealing an investment in the coin is a terrible move.
I share the same view that Dent is a terrible investment. However their concept of making it easy for users to acquire Dent tokens without having to deal with the complexities of using a cryptocurrency exchange is commendable. If ADA will some day become a major currency, we will have to make it just as easy for people to buy their ADA.
Point taken. Seems bitcoin is at this very moment bowling along but ADA doesn’t seem to follow anywhere near the same pace going.Your point could improve this.
I keep thinking about the card tech they are deploying in Korea. I gather the key player who issues the cards is in “payment processing”, which I take to be the POS terminals retailers use as well as APIs for on-line, etc. The vendors are being paid in local fiat and the customer pays ADA, so that has to be balanced by the customers buying ADA with local fiat.
In principle, a retailer could take cash for ADA through the same terminals. Extended further, you could sell ADA to your “friends” with a phone. And of course, ATMs could provide such services, not that most banks would participate (at least at first), but the machines and systems can support it easily.
Ok, that makes sense. Ocean is a “partner” to Singularity.net, so there is a connection. Harmony seems to address the issue of shifting power to the data source, the consumer/user of the systems. In the end, I think many of these efforts can become a network of services that together deliver something that is much much more. Cardano’s settlement layer and interoperability can be the glue that holds it all together as a network. Value can be traded through ADA with any other interoperable coin or token, and value can be stored in ADA or or any other coin as each user chooses.
The unbanked are producers in the data network, and projects that create value from their collected data and feed some of the surplus back to those users can then be the basis for local trade and services as well. In other words, wealth generated by the activity of the system seeds the local economy, and since the wealth starts in one or more digital currency domains, there is less market/exchange friction to use the digital currencies even more ways.
These system will likely increase “velocity” of flows of currencies and goods.
