cool and scary.
first a good bit of businesses have things like this, and most of the time it is designed to obfuscate the money you are spending. Look at xbox points or battlefield battlefunds, and they are almost never one to one with the dollar, because they dont want you thinking about what you are spending.
Another scary thought, is corps used to have currency back in the day of the robber barons. Where you ended up getting paid in walmart coins, which only could be spent at walmart. You lived in walmart housing, and shopped at the walmart corporate store.(obviously not walmart but what ever was around at the time). It is where "
i owe my soul to the company store" came from in the song 16 tons.
and walmart is very interested in doing this again, they recently lost a case in mexico where they WERE paying their employees in
walmart coins. er walmart gift cards, where employees could only use them in stores and only at presale prices.
a decentralized can be a boon to consumers, but a wide variety of them can also be our bane. Remembering where we came from is always wise as we head towards where we are going.
Exactly, I hope it doesn't get to that point, but it probably will.
Remember when every big corporation had their own charge card? People had wallets full of cards from Sears, Woolworth, Standard Oil, etc. It was inconvenient and expensive overhead for the company bookkeeping. Then came Master Charge, they made it easy to get credit everywhere with just one card. The problem is now, the credit card banks in North Dakota charge too much. Imagine that.
I see history repeating itself here. Businesses will have the ability to once again stimulate sales with a gift card, without the bookkeeping overhead. As the value of their currency grows, it can become as valuable as they want to make it. Walmart wants to start their own bank, but has been denied the ability to do so by the SEC. Cryptocurrency can allow them to create a credit service with little overhead for transactions and even let them setup cheap and secure wire transfers globally.
