I'm interested in this. I'm working on Bitmark right now but we're very interested in making it an easy to use currency. So that type of real life purchase case research is of great interest to our project and perhaps we can share things we learn about this type of thing.
I'm in Asia and there are tons and tons of prepaid cards for all kinds of products. Being able to buy a prepaid card that can get you crypto would be amazing and be a huge step for adoption!
Is anyone else in the btt community working on this already? Probably you and me can jumpstart this project?
Can some members of Ora and Bitmark, and the wider community, team up to address this?
From our side consider yourselves to have any resources required - other than funds - we will gladly discuss, specify, and create anything required.
To kick start the effort I would propose the creation of a simple online key sweeper, given any private key (or alias for one) it sweeps the currency associated with the key in to a user supplied address.
Such a thing would serve as a simple framework to allow paper or plastic loaded cards, a receiver simply enters a code online and an address for any wallet, and they have funds within minutes. It can be replicated and made to be pretty later.
Thanks coinsolidation! I think co-operation between coin projects like ORA & Bitmark would be wonderfull, so thank you very much for following up. I'm not a tech guy myself, so probably can't add a whole lot to the tech side of this discussion myself, but as a regular user of crypto currencies I can see that making ALL crypto currencies more user friendly is in everyone's interest.
Like many, I have been following what jl777 has been doing with the SuperNET closely, and while the teleporting ideas to increase anon is very worthwhile and getting a lot of the attention, it's actually the prepaid debit card option that first got me interested in bitcoindark.
Being able to access crypto funds using a prepaid debit card via an ATM or at a POS terminal in a shop will make crypto currencies usable, in the current environment. If Bitmark & ORA could achieve the same result using another system to jl777's anon card, then that would provide some redundancy for the crypto movement in case jl777's system ran into problems, so I think it would be a great area to explore further.
In the end crypto currencies HAVE to be user friendly, and usable in everyday situations now, and that's via plastic cards, and to a lesser extent (but obviously growing rapidly) mobile devices.
edit: direction has to be both ways - (fiat > crypto) & (crypto > fiat) - can we devise one system that does both? jl777's anon card is (crypto>fiat) only, so maybe we can work on going the other direction, (fiat>crypto), but connect it into the same card processor, coinomat.
You are right, we need to devise open alternatives as a service to the wider community, and provide models going forward that do not rely on any one person, and also where the fates of projects are not tied - I (and we) share your thoughts on the matter.
An interesting question, can we devise a system that does both?
There is one such system that we plan to use heavily, the notion of micro trust, by trusting businesses and services which people already trust with smaller amounts of funds, we can utilize them as natural gateways - if any fiat accepting service allows withdrawals and deposits of marks, then they become a little gateway. We hope to initially avoid any AML or gov issues by being dressed as reputation, in the same way bitcoin has problems but facebook credits do not - just distributed rather than a single commercial entity.
I feel that speculators and the existing broad community is already heavily focused on crypto > fiat, it is easy to exit but hard to enter. Thus personally feel that the walls we need to break down are in to the systems not out.
Let me propose something backward: why don't we start by working on the worst and slowest ways to do fiat > crypto, then improve from there - rather than going for optimal solutions straight out. We may learn much along the way, and build up a good set of alternatives.
How should we proceed? We need a collaborative space for those interested to specify and discuss.