Abstract
Pay with a (Group) Selfie (PGS) is a novel payment system developed at Khalifa University in the UAE, and currently under test at the Institut de Mathématiques et Science Physique (IMSP) in Benin. The PGS system uses a group selfie to gather all information items needed to encode a purchase: the seller, the buyer, the service/product and the agreed price. Using Visual Cryptography (VC), the photo is then “digitally ripped” into two shares, one for the buyer and one for the seller. In the current version of PGS, these shares are eventually and independently sent to a Bank that cooperates to offer the digital payment service to population living in rural areas. When the purchases of a buyer at a given seller pass a pre-set threshold, the Bank executes a traditional fund transfer between the two. This way, PGS spreads the Bank’s transfer fee over multiple purchases, decreasing the financial cost of each purchase. This paper discusses the challenges of transparently coupling the PGS payment system with digital wallets holding a crypto currency, bringing the financial cost of each purchase to zero.
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Notes
- 1.
The Bank alerts the sellers if the buyer’s funds become insufficient for the eventual transfer. Each seller can decide whether to block or allow further purchases.
- 2.
Of course, inter-bank arrangements could be made to support account holders from other banks. This would however increase the financial cost of the transactions.
- 3.
This was however not always the case. Some traditional currencies managed by multiple authorities have survived until the late 1800 s.
- 4.
- 5.
Here, we neglect both the cost – for the buyer – of having/carrying a mobile terminal and the saving – for the seller – due to not having to handle cash.
- 6.
Ideally, the only costs PGS users will have are the ICT ones, coming close to the “digital unicorn” of no-financial-cost payments.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under the grant n. APP198273.
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Damiani, E. et al. (2018). Porting the Pay with a (Group) Selfie (PGS) Payment System to Crypto Currency. In: Belqasmi, F., Harroud, H., Agueh, M., Dssouli, R., Kamoun, F. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Developing Countries. AFRICATEK 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 206. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67837-5_15
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