Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal Bitcoin white paper proposed a revolutionary new digital currency. But it was based on its predecessor Hashcash and the proof-of-work concept was originally proposed by Dwork and Naor in 1992 1 as a means of combatting junk email.
1.1. The success of Bitcoin
So why did Bitcoin achieve such explosive economic value while its predecessors were mostly of academic interest only?
1.2. Real Implementation
More than just a white paper, “Satoshi” released the open source reference implementation in 2009. Because Bitcoin itself was more than just a white paper, but an actual working system, it was able to capture the imagination of developers and leverage the paradigm of open source software development to quickly iterate and improve into a global-class financial infrastructure.
1.3. Open Governance
More importantly, Bitcoin is an open system that allows for evolution through forking and as such provides an assurance of its long term trustworthiness. If stakeholders ever get upset with the direction of Bitcoin, they can and already have produced forks that users and miners can migrate to if they see fit.
1.4. The Problems of Bitcoin
The biggest problem with Bitcoin at the moment is that it has not broken out into mainstream adoption. One study pegs the number of active cryptocurrency users to between 2.9 and 5.8 million. This paper proposes a solution for adding a billion users to the cryptocurrency movement by adding two key elements missing in order to provide significant adoption by mainstream users. The next billion users have not yet entered cryptocurrency for two main reasons:
1.5. Too complicated
Cryptocurrency suffers from complexity for the average user. Managing private keys, public keys, blockchain concepts—it’s all vastly out of the reach of the average user. In some cases the next
Billion users may even barely be able to operate a smartphone.
1.6. Not Relevant
Today, the only thing you can buy with a cryptocurrency are other cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of people have no involvement with this process and no interest. Until the average user can use cryptocurrency to buy a bag of rice or a loaf of bread, the relevancy of cryptocurrency will be restricted to a small audience.
1.7. The Solution
This paper presents Pundi X, a platform for consumerizing cryptocurrencies by enabling their use in retail Point of Sale (POS) through a mobile app and contactless payment card. Following in the footsteps of Bitcoin, Pundi X has the same properties of Real Implementation, Open Governance and Incentivization that allows for the rapid global expansion of the solution.
1.8. Real Implementation
Pundi X is a complete end-to-end solution for contactless and mobile retail point-ofsale (POS) including a full-stack reference implementation of all the components. It includes a mobile application, a contactless smart card and point-of-sale (POS) terminals that are already in deployment. All of these components will be made widely available through open source and open specifications.
1.9. Open Governance
By releasing the full-stack reference implementations as open source and open specifications, we can enable ubiquitous distribution worldwide of the Pundi X protocols and ensure the rapid expansion of the value of the Pundi X Network.
1.10. Incentivization
The Pundi X network incentivizes participation through providing free hardware to retail stores in the initial target geography of Indonesia. Users are incentivized to participate in the Pundi X network through accessibility and ease of use and the convenience of mobile payment.
With a solution that decreases complexity and adds relevance of cryptocurrencies to end users, we will see rapid mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies and the merging of the crypto-economy (current estimated value in October 2017 of 170B) with the much larger mainstream economy (estimated value 214T).
PundiX White Paper
