Splitwise is a great app for settling debts among friends going for a dinner, on a road trip, roomies sharing an apartment, etc. They had added an option to balance your debts and lending across the network (ex: you owe Alex, you pay Linda who owes Alex through her n number of connections) which kind of changed the app to something an equivalent of a digital currency, except for two missing nodes. 1) An input node where you can pump money to the network (to your wallet), say in form of salary/payment from your employer/customer and 2) a sink node where you can pay your employees/vendors (ex: POS at a grocery store). For the former, they could start a Soft Banking service, like apps such as Cash App. For the latter, they could partner with services like Square, other POS aggregators or Banks/Payment-Gateways.
If Splitwise, or any other similar app for that matter, can do this, they are essentially creating a financial eco system where people can transact freely, their good and services, probably as in a digital version of the Barter system. Eventually they could introduce their own digital currency and get rid of all unnecessary currency conversions as well.
The only trouble with this picture is the Centralized nature of the network, which Splitwise has complete control over, not to mention the Data Gold mine they will be sitting on top of which stores information like where people are getting/spending their money, what products and services are in demand at a location, micro-financing opportunities, to mention a few. This data is so deep, that you could in theory predict/simulate if a given random new-business will succeed at a given location.
They could in future invest in moving the storage/ledger to a block chain or hyper ledger, as scaling permits.
Yeah, lots of ideas, what is your point?
I have tried explaining, tweeting this to many Apps mentioned above in the past, and I am tired of making my case every single time. So I decided to write it down here, and paste the link so that I can make updates as necessary later. I am pretty sure no one will pay attention, but I have to do my part to influence their decision making, however small the impact is.
Why don't you do it yourself then?
Doing it from scratch is hard, I am not good at execution, I am focused on solving other important problems which I have better chance at, etc.. Over the years, what I learned is that the fastest way to solve problems is not by solving it on your own but by influencing the right people at the right positions to solve those problems.
