In China, WeChat Pay is the king of electronic payment field, it even far surpasses Alibaba’s Alipay. From the countryside to the city, in every place, WeChat Pay has achieved popularity all over China. When people go out shopping, few of them carry cash and most of them use WeChat Pay, it is very convenient. When you need to pay, you just need to sweep the QR code presented by the merchant to receive payment, enter the payment amount, enter your wallet password, click to confirm, and the merchant can immediately receive the payment voice prompt. When you pay at the supermarket checkout, show the WeChat payment QR code and the supermarket cashier will sweep it with the code gun to finish the payment immediately, which is very convenient. Another important feature of WeChat Pay is the money transfer, which allows you to transfer a certain amount of money to your friends in an interesting way, similar to the way Grin transfers money. The process of transferring money is like this: first select a friend in the friends list that I want to transfer money to, enter the chat screen, click on transfer, enter the amount, enter the password, confirm it and send the other person an icon that shows the amount of the transfer. If my friend receives the money, he has to click on this icon to complete the transfer. If he doesn’t click on this icon, after 24 hours the transfer will expire and the money will go back to my own wallet.
Interesting, also interactive transactions (receiver has to accept manually). Grin could do the same, just would have to link contacts to their wallet address, and maybe to a Nostr address.
Yes, WeChat Pay is the same interactive transaction as Grin, but WeChat Pay has been a huge success in China, with over a billion people using WeChat Pay.
Why is WeChat Pay a huge success? WeChat Pay is based on WeChat Chat, and WeChat Pay is just one of the many features that come with WeChat. The reason for its success is that after the huge success of WeChat, WeChat offered instant text, voice, and video chat to everyone for free, so a large number of people were willing to use it, and when more people used WeChat, they would try other features on WeChat. This is when WeChat Pay’s convenient and fast payments and transfers gained massive popularity.
Here is a thought that a good chat software can promote more people to use Grin payment.
Nope, WeChat Pay is successful because it is based on a real currency.
Hopefully truly decentralized coins can be somewhat of a refuge for anyone being hurt by a social credit system.
WeChat Pay has been a huge success, but it’s only for China and is centralized. Grin, on the other hand, is open to the whole world. I’m using WeChat Pay as an example here just to illustrate the reason for the huge success of interactive transactions.
In the long run, I believe that the achievements of decentralized Grin will far exceed the achievements of WeChat Pay in the future.
This will require Grin to have:
More security;
Sufficient privacy;
Faster;
Providing an API payment interface that is very easy to integrate;
…
Then there will be developers who will integrate Grin payments into websites, apps, or generate a lot of whimsy around Grin…
Not sure what you mean with security, but payment proofs should make transactions perferctly secure for both receiver and sender
Privacy is already good, with CoinSwap, its
1 minute block time should suffice, otherwise we have to wait for lightening to be implemented if we want really instantaneous transactions. Personally I think for now 1 minute is fast enough.
As chat App @davidtavarez already has nice proof of concept of Grin transactions via nostr, as does @18fcv with IronBelly and @Yeastplume are experimenting with nostr transactions for Grin rust.
So, we should have something comparable to WeChat, but decentralized. The main challenge would be to make this wallet and chat integration easy and safe/private to use by default.