According to Peter Todd, “ doesn’t have a hope” when competing with consumer payment systems such as credit cards.
In a at the 2019 MIT Expo, the former Core developer spoke on the use of premissioned, semi-permissioned, and permissionless blockchains, including for payment applications. When comparing such as to existing payment systems such as card companies, Todd remained pessimistic about the former’s viability:
Todd instead compared to international transfer services such as Western Union, which compete in the same space of transferring money across borders, where is able to perform transfers more reliably and efficiently than many traditional services.
When dealing with moving funds across borders, a like generally holds a significant advantage in speed and fees due to its ability to operate in a borderless, location-independent space. However, compared with the consumer-facing fees, convenience, and speed of transaction of payment cards, typically falls short.
Credit cards maintain the payments edge, but may quickly lose ground
At present, card systems maintain a significant edge in the payments space in most of the world as one of the more predominant payment tools. However, disadvantages of these systems have become more recently, which may influence their hold over the space. Recently, Visa and Mastercard announced plans to this year, driving up the costs for merchants accepting non-cash payments, which may be passed on to the consumer. Marriott hotels also underwent one of the , compromising the information of hundreds of millions of guests, including credit card numbers, potentially causing financial complications for millions.
The that possess over card systems, such as lower fees, no account setup, financial privacy, no identity theft risk, and more, may cause the former to take over larger portions of the payments space in the near future as the relative competitiveness of cards declines.
Dash is steadily working at overcoming ’s weak points
While many projects experiment with use cases outside of payments, Dash remains focused on developing the best digital payments system in the world, with an eye to improving the present-day limitations of . In the recently-implemented 0.13 version, Dash enabled , solving the settlement delay issue facing many of its competitors. In the upcoming 0.14 iteration, Dash plans to implement , a measure for protecting against 51% attacks and further securing the network. Finally, version 1.0 will implement usernames and contact lists, giving a much easier and more intuitive user experience to compete with modern payment apps while maintaining full decentralization.
Published at Mon, 25 Mar 2019 19:19:03 +0000