People who can think know that eventually Apple, Google and others will integrate Bitcoin into their key consumer facing offerings. With Google, they may integrate it into Gmail. With Apple they have the perfect vehicle in the shape of Apple Wallet.
Apple has its wallet built into every copy of iOS. Currently it is useless for anyone without a Credit Card, but this could change with a single integration, bringing billions of people into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Here is what it could look like…
First, you add your Wallet of Satoshi just as you would a credit card. Two taps and it’s done.
You are instantly ready to start spending with Bitcoin through your Apple Wallet. It will be as simple as that, as far as you are concerned.
What just happened?
Apple Wallet just connected to the copy of Wallet of Satoshi on your iPhone.
Apple Wallet now has the ability to spend the Bitcoin you have in Wallet of Satoshi for you, using one of Apple’s synthetic Credit Cards.
Did you know that when you spend money with Apple Wallet using a Credit Card, that it is not your card that is recorded as the spending card, but one of Apple’s synthetic cards? That’s how they keep your information safe and relatively private.
When you go to pay at any place that takes Apple Pay, you whip out your phone, and tap. You select the Wallet of Satoshi “Card” and Apple Wallet pulls Bitcoin from your Wallet of Satoshi in real time, and then makes a Credit Card payment for you from its own synthetic Credit Card.
- Apple knows you’re good for the money; they just took it from you.
- The person you’re paying with a tap doesn’t know you used Bitcoin.
- You are happy now.
By doing this, Apple doesn’t need its own Bitcoin wallet…although that would be an immensely powerful and important signal. Perhaps they could do what I describe above as…a first step, to see how big the potential market is.
And it is big.
There are a large number of people on Smartphones who are unbannked:
The true number is probably hard to estimate, but there is a close estimate of the number of smartphone users on Earth; with an estimate that there are 1.46 billion active iPhone users worldwide. Apple cannot serve these people because they can’t get Credit Cards. They can use Bitcoin however, and they know how to top up Mobile phones, because they don’t have “pay in arrears” mobile phones either.
Once Apple is convinced by the power of Bitcoin, it could become a custodian itself, and then, as it does with iMessage allow anyone on iOS to send Bitcoin to anyone else on iOS as a ledger entry. A marketplace of 1.46 Billion users trading with synthetic money that is not a walled garden money but a global game space money could be a very powerful tool.
The idea for this piece came from Tom Dobbels of Azteco https://twitter.com/tom_dobbels and was written up by Akin Fernandez https://twitter.com/Beautyon_. You’re welcome.
