I'm not a techie, but I've been following this company and the...

I'm not a techie, but I've been following this company and the bitcoin/blockchain space for a while. I've been following this thread and I'm seeing some confusion about this company and the new product.

Here's my understanding. I look at the new Airpocket product as pretty much a digital version of the hawala remittance system, which is very commonly used in unbanked communities and through which billions are transferred each year. The hawala system is based entirely on honour/trust and works because the hawala broker has a family or community based reputation. The problem with transacting via the internet is that it can be anonymous (on the internet, nobody knows I'm a dog) so you don't know if you can trust that the person at the other end of your transaction is who you think it is. It's not just about trusting the internet, it's about whether you can trust your counterparty is who they say they are. There have been attempts on the internet to address this trust issue - such as your reputation on eBay making you a more trusted transaction party, but even eBay itself still gets numerous disputes. In the remittance space, we trust the reputation of a centralised company (western union, paypal, visa, etc) and pay them % for the privilege of them lending their credibility to our transaction. In each case it's a centralised solution to the trust problem.

The blockchain is a decentralised solution to the trust problem. A blockchain is effectively a ledger that no one party controls (as it is decentralised), so no one party can manipulate it. Any transaction can be checked by anybody back against the ledger to verify it occurred and therefore verify the change of ownership occurred. Bitcoin and blockchains aren't the same thing (like email and the web aren't the same thing). Bitcoin (the currency) does use a blockchain, but it isn't the only application for the blockchain concept - so Airpocket can use the blockchain without having anything to do with bitcoin. Also I think there are other similar products being developed elsewhere - e.g. looks to me like a very similar concept to ripple. The use cases for blockchain concepts are really exciting and I hope this team can pull this off.