Something really significant is happening; money and payments are becoming smart because of a technological design called blockchain.
The next generation of money is here and is 100% digital and programmable – allowing money to contain rules, to move around and to act autonomously. These Smart Money, that are created with blockchain technology, is called cryptocurrencies, and have proven that there exists a new price-point for transactions.
This type of money is intelligent and sort of "built in” to the internet, rendering traditional payment schemes less necessary - so obviously this is a significant agent of change and a fascinating challenge and opportunity to the Payment industry.
The long term benefits for society, government and the general economy are of such a magnitude that it is safe to say, that in 10 years from now, no one would want to return to the money transaction and -management models anno 2017. Just as we don't want to return to 2007’s mobile phones.
Remember that Apple introduced the first iPhone just 10 years ago along with the new, revolutionary ideas of apps, smartphones and constant internet connection. In those 10 years that has gone since that, a true symbiosis between man and internet has happened, as we can no longer phantom a life without the augmentation these ubiquitous hardware and software platforms gives us today.
In 202x we will manage everything of importance using apps provided to us by process service providers that will offer us convenience, peace-of-mind, total overview, intelligent and automated services, low-cost administration of all individual and family matters, advice, credit and loans, mortgage, insurance, asset- and tax management etc. We will all have a Digital Identity, a virtual DataVault and a Dashboard, which will become our official legal place on the internet - which a “Managing Assistant” (our bank/FSI) will help us populate, manage and monitor.
Intelligent money is not money as we know it today….but rather smart contracts that triggers verified value transfers. This opens for opportunities within advanced systems, services and applications for merchants, banks, end-users and society in general.
Today we automate the outcome of processes, i.e. the payment - tomorrow we will automate the process itself, while the value transactions will become autonomous.
At the core of any process we find Party A, Party B and a Contract regulating a bi-directional transfer of energy (in any form; goods, man-hours, information and money). One could call this ABC the molecule of process(ing).
What Blockchain (BLC) does is integrating ABC into one system allowing automation that yields significant reduction in cost and process time.
BLC is a protocol for smart value transfer (Smart Payments), just as HTTP is a protocol for smart information sharing and TCP/IP a protocol for smart connection of computers. In this light it is easy to understand why BLC is the foundation of the next layer of the internet.
At its heart, BLC is a self-sustaining, peer-to-peer database technology for managing and recording transactions with no central bank or clearinghouse involvement. BLC is the aggregation of cryptographic hashes, distributed databases and consensus building that creates a framework for P2P value transfer, thus BLC will become a utility and thus we are dealing with a true blue ocean of opportunity.