My thoughts after reading the paper: I think the intention of banking unbanked people is good and should be pursued. But, I think that the people and organizations pursuing this should be foundations, volunteers and governments. For example the UN or the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation ($40B+ fund) is more suited to give $10 to 2B people, they could actually pay for it.
If you want to wait for them to take the action, then wait. We don't believe in waiting - we believe in action. If we can prove what we doing is viable then we can prove to them it can be done. Then we are more than happy to partner with the likes of the UN, World Bank, and Foundation such as Gates. But saying that we should push a proposal forward using a yet untested technology at these kinds of institutions is a waste of time. They have safer, less risky investments to deal with. These are risk averse sources of funding, they are not VC.
The main technological value I see you may develop is doing secure cryptographic signatures in a smartphone, more precisely, storing a private key securely, even if the device was stolen or lost and the memory was removed and sniffed. Also an app can be reverse-engineered, so your app needs to be resistant to that. Those are security problems that are unsolved unless you use a long password and encrypt the private key with it, I don't see how you are securing a private key without a password here. The software to do facial and voice authentication is definitely valuable, on my own searches I haven't found 3rd parties that do this well which is part of the reason pretty much no one is using facial and voice authentication on money apps. Iris and fingerprints are more common but less secure that a password.
Agree. To a point. We secure it on a central server until we have the technology to do otherwise. And that does not exist yet.
In the paper I read that this is not a charity, therefore (1) how do I make money as an investor in this token? Why are you pushing a new currency when these communities live in countries with an established fiat currency, (2) Wouldn't it make more sense to just digitize that already accepted currency?. (3) How are you going to finance this development after you burn through the pre-ico and ico money, do you have a business model? (no business model found on the paper). And finally (4) What smartphones cost $10-$20 and how are these going to be distributed or sold in developing nations.
Actually the project will be run out of a foundation - which will control and hold all the core software stack similar to Ethereum or DECENT. There will also be a 'profit with a purpose' corporation which will develop and fund development via an accelerator and incubator programme investing in Blockchain startups to build on top of the stack to create more services for the end users.
From my experience living in a developing country, one that is dark in the maps shown in your paper, the only communication infrastructure that many villages and small cities do have is cellular. So these people can call and text on pre-paid telephony plans. Most of them have access to basic phones with no internet and wouldn't afford a wireless internet plan if they had a smartphone. So I'm guessing that for this to work on a massive scale you would need to partner up with telecommunication companies so they give these people access to data related with your app/domains for free (which is what internet.org is doing) and sell them a smartphone for the price of a basic phone that shows their native currency in the app. A way to withdraw those electronic funds in cash would also be good for the money in the app to be accepted as money. For now, I think cash works very well for these places.
Personally I have thought about this alot. And when I was in Nairobi in Kibera, I realised we could be at the mercy of telcos in the country. However, I also know that we are months away from using k-band low orbiting satellite solutions with cheap receiver technology such as Kymeta (Bill Gates backed) which can allow us to bypass the telcos and pull in broadband via the sky. There would be perhaps some regulatory issues - but it's also a chance for Gates to put his stamp on it if we use Kymeta and let's see them fight that war. Telco has their lobbyists in Nairobi in government and all governments but strangling the people from lower cost Internet is a losing war.
If we were to do Kibera - Africa's largest slum, I would come in with a dozen receivers, empower the huts selling mPesa and give them one along with the banking function to convert HMQ to Kenyan Shillings and they become de facto broadband suppliers as well as bankers.
That's just an idea. It's not in our milestones or set in stone. It's one way I have been thinking about how to tackle this.
Best
Richard Kastelein
Interim CMO
Humaniq
