Big Ethereum Adoption Boost Thanks To New Scheduled Payments

CrowdConscious

Published in

The Cryptoverse

6 min readSep 17, 2018

On Today’s Episode of The Cryptoverse…

As users, we have a big problem that is getting in the way of greater adoption.

If crypto is truly going to become the new financial system, then it needs to be able to replace all the functions of the existing system.

One very basic feature that we lack, a feature I have often talked about it…the ability to do scheduled payments.

Watch It Here!

Episode Transcript & Notes

If we don’t have scheduled payments, the notion of paying your bills in cryptocurrency remains a fantasy.

A more immediate problem might be the time window that Initial Coin Offerings give for their opening to accept contributions. The problem there is that the opening time may not be convenient, but you have to be at your computer at the specified time in order to send your transaction.

Or, what if you had remote workers that you wanted to pay in cryptocurrency on the 1st of next month?

Thanks to an innovation from the Ethereum Alarm Clock and a network of TimeNodes, scheduling payments in advanced is something you can do as of right now using MyCrypto.com.

Today’s Sponsor

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Let’s Continue with The Show!

So, let’s start off with the practical demo and then talk about how it works under the hood, plus the wider implications of this.

Here I am logged into MyCrypto.com.

I’m on the Send tab and you may notice this new toggle called ‘Send Later.’

This is the feature we’re discussing today.

If I flip this on I’m presented with a whole slew of new options such as the exact time I want the payment to go out, which timezone I’m in, if I’m willing to pay a bounty to get the transaction done within a specific window of time, the transaction fee I’m willing to pay and any contract data I want to send along with it.

As well as specifying a clock time for the transaction, in some circumstances you may want to send the transaction at a specific block number.

You can do that too by hitting the Blocks button and then entering the block number that will trigger this transaction.

Like the ICO example above, funding may begin at a specific block number in which case it would be better to use this feature for greater precision.

But it’s really as simple as that, it’s just sending an Ethereum transaction as you normally would but with these new conditions attached.

One snag is that this will cost us 2 separate Ethereum transactions fees.

The first one is to put our order for a scheduled transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, and the second one is to process the actual payment as the scheduled time.

Now at the moment, using the method I’ve just shown you, you can only schedule future payments of ETH, but the next logical development for me would be to add the ability to schedule the sending of ERC20 tokens too.

Once we get that, even more possibilities open up such as scheduling payments in Gemini Dollars for example.

The next logical step after that would be recurring payments.

What we have talked about so far is the ability to do a single payment, but set it for a future date. Recurring payments would be the ability to automatically set a schedule to pay someone repeatedly.

That opens up the whole world of memberships and subscriptions, which isn’t currently a use case cryptocurrency is good for.

Say if you wanted to support WikiLeaks or Project Veritas, they could accept GUSD and you could setup a recurring payment to them.

The problem with the GUSD specifically however is if the powers that be saw that it was being a big help to sustain Wikileaks and friends, they can go to Gemini and interfere.

I read in the Gemini dollar whitepaper that there is the ability to stop transactions, which does not surprise me since that is probably a requirement imposed on them by the regulators.

There are other things that could get in the way of scheduled transactions in ETH though.

Things that come to mind are network load and fees.

Unfortunately, when we submit our order to have the scheduled transaction processed we have to guess what the conditions will be on the network at that time.

What seems like a reasonable transaction fee today, may leave you at the bottom of the pile when the scheduled transaction is scheduled to happen….which means yes it’ll get broadcast at the desired time, but then has to wait in line.

This doesn’t really matter for most transactions though. As long as my future transaction is broadcast and confirmed within a 24 window, I’d be OK with that.

But again you can configure all the parameters based on your situation.

Now I’m going to swing the other way here and say that the very fact that you can configure all the parameters is going to scarce off a lot of people.

So while scheduled and recurring payments are something that are required to boost adoption to the masses, perhaps this method I’ve shown today is a bit too techy.

Perhaps this is more the domain of the developers who can then add layers of user interface on top that hide all the complexity so an average user can just set the future time and date and click go.

Final Point Now…

How this works under the hood is through a network of ‘TimeNodes’ who operate on a trustless basis to provide this future broadcast service and earn fees.

So if you have computers that are always on and you are interested in earning fees as a TimeNode, ETH Alarm Clock provide a downloadable app and an in-depth tutorial and how to get started.

Links to all of that will be linked in the sources.

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