Friday, April 24, 2015
On The Road with the Bitcoin Bus: The Bit Mom’s Journal (Part 1)
8 out of 10 PCs Vulnerable: Forbes Confirms Gupta's Intel Suspicions
ItBit Set to Become First US Regulated Bitcoin Bank
Thursday, April 23, 2015
The Rising Wave of Crypto Two-Factor Authentication
OpenBazaar Releases 0.4.0 ‘Portobello,’ Bringing Major Additions
This Chip Turns a Dumb Phone Into a Bitcoin Wallet
Factom’s Latest Partnership Takes on US Healthcare
Bankymoon Introduces Bitcoin Payments to Smart Meters for Power Grids
South African Bitcoin startup Bankymoon has built the world’s first blockchain smart metering solution for modern power and utility grids, VentureBurn reports.
The startup outlined its plans in a presentation titled “Smart Grids and the Blockchain – Bitcoin’s first killer App” at the recent Bitcoin Conference Africa in Cape Town, South Africa. Lorien Gamaroff, founder and CEO of Bankymoon, is expected to give another presentation on May 14 at the Bitcoin Conference in Prague.
Modern “smart grids” permit efficient management of supply and demand, with Internet-connected “smart meters” that react to changing conditions and can be topped in real-time in case of need. According to Gamaroff, by 2023 most power grids will be smart: 80 percent of the grids in the United States, 60 percent in Europe and 45 percent in the Asia Pacific region.
“You’d think that with all the smartness happening in our grid, that the problems are solved,” said Gamaroff. “But, in fact, this brings us to the most difficult and biggest problem of all, which is payments. Your grid could be as smart as you like but if all customers aren’t paying, it’s worthless and it becomes unsustainable and will collapse.”
Bankymoon, founded in 2015, specializes in deep integration of bitcoin payments into current processes.
“The power of bitcoin lies in the ability to program functionality to automatically respond to payment transactions,” notes the Bankymoon website. “Unlike bank accounts, Bitcoin addresses can be monitored by predefined processes which can trigger automated actions. These actions can form part of a workflow which will only proceed once Bitcoin transaction has been detected.”
Bankymoon’s smart meters have their own Bitcoin addresses. When a smart meter receives a Bitcoin payment, Bankymoon calculates the tariff and then loads the meter. The company, which has customers in South Africa and is looking to expand into Tanzania and Nigeria soon, is currently looking for new investors.
Bankymoon’s integration of Bitcoin payments into smart metering systems for modern grids allows users to “send” electricity, water and gas to anybody else in the world, from anywhere, by topping their utility meters.
“Imagine a student abroad who needs to have their meter topped up,” said Gamaroff. “They’d phone their parent and ask them to send money. The parent now doesn’t have to remit anything. They can just go and top up the meter using bitcoin.”
The same model permits donating to worthy recipients, for example schools and hospitals, by directly contributing to their utility bills.
Besides the “programmable money” features of Bitcoin, the existence of large unbanked populations in the developing world shows the benefits of bitcoin payment integration in smart grids. Bankymoon’s solution bypasses banks and credit cards – which many users don’t have access to – and, using an Internet of Things (IoT) approach, goes directly to the smart metering devices.
According to Gamaroff, the application of Bitcoin to smart metering shows how deeply digital currencies can pervasively and positively impact societies. “This [solution] is potentially game-changing for driving bitcoin adoption,” he said.
5 Revelations about Bitcoin from the ING 2015 Mobile Banking Survey
ING Bank hired global research firm, Ipsos, to survey 14,829 Internet users from 13 European countries, the United States and Australia. ING asked participants about mobile banking, payments and digital currency, such as bitcoin.
The report has some sobering insights into how Bitcoin adoption is going in the West, including what consumers see as the biggest benefits and problems of mobile payments.
1. People Are Using Less Cash
According to European consumers, cash is on its way out. When asked if their use of cash has declined over the last year, 50 percent of European participants said yes. And out of the group who answered yes, 80 percent think that trend will continue throughout the next year. 50 percent in Australia and 54 percent in the United States felt that their use of cash had declined over the past year as well.
Austria and Germany had the lowest percentage of people thinking they were using less cash, with only 31 percent saying yes. Turkey, Poland and Italy had the highest, with 60 percent or above saying they were using less.
2. Trust is the biggest barrier
Forty-two percent of European survey participants who have not used a mobile payment app say, “I don’t trust it” is the biggest reason. Trust was closely followed by “Not yet having an opportunity to use it”, which got 41 percent. Following were “I don’t understand it” at 10 percent, “It’s no easier” at 9 percent and “It’s more difficult to track what I spend” at 8 percent.
Participants who had mobile payment apps were asked whom they trusted the most to make mobile payment apps. “My bank” came in first with a whopping 81 percent. Named groups (Google, Apple, etc.) came in with just 5 percent, while social media websites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) got 4 percent. Only 2 percent of participants said other banks.
3. Is Bitcoin the future of payments?
The majority of participants in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Germany and Austria said no. And 72 percent of participants across Europe either said they didn’t have an opinion or no. Australia and the United States fared slightly better, with less than half disagreeing.
However, 45 percent of Turkish respondents answered Bitcoin was the future of payments. Turkey scored the highest and was followed up with Italy at 43 percent and Spain at 33 percent.
These countries also had the highest number of people who have used the digital currency in the last 12 months (as you will read next).
4. Bitcoin awareness still low, but users are believers
Despite media hype and regularly making headlines, many Europeans still don’t know what Bitcoin even is and only tiny portion have actually used it. When European participants were asked whether if in the past 12 months they had used digital currency, 24 percent responded no, 49 percent responded they had no idea what it was, and only 4 percent responded that they had.
Fifty-two percent of Australian participants responded that they don’t what Bitcoin is and 43 percent from the United States responded similarly.
Turkey had the highest percentage of people who have used the cryptocurrency, with 9 percent responding yes. Italy and the United States tied for second with 7 percent. Poland was third with 6 percent, and Spain came in fourth with 5 percent.
The European countries with the highest amount of cryptocurrency users were also the countries with higher percentages of people who believed it was the future of payments.
5. Non-Bitcoin mobile payments are winning
While mobile payments as a whole remain niche and nonmainstream, it seems Bitcoin is losing to more conventional mobile payment apps created by banks and financial technology (fintech) startups. While countries such Turkey and the United States had more than 60 percent of participants saying they are using mobile banking apps in the last 12 months, none of the countries had more than 10 percent of people who had previously used Bitcoin.
The study shows mobile payments as a whole are growing, and the countries with the highest adoption of mobile banking and payments also tend to have the highest percentage of people who had used and believe in Bitcoin.
You can read the survey’s findings for yourself here (download).
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