Launch HN: Nala (YC W19) – Internet-Free Mobile Payments App for Africa

Re:Launch HN: Nala (YC W19) – Internet-Free Mobile Payments ... by arciini on Thursday March 14, 2019 @05:58PM (#19394250)

This is pretty cool! I don't know much about M-Pesa and all of the other solutions. What kind of technology do you use to avoid double-spending, etc. with fully-offline ledgers? Is it something based on signatures/cryptography?

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Re:Launch HN: Nala (YC W19) – Internet-Free Mobile Payments ... by nexuist on Thursday March 14, 2019 @06:04PM (#19394289)

I don't think it's actually connection-less. They're just using cell carrier network protocols rather than typical TCP/IP - so in a sense it's "Internet-Free", but there's still some sort of centralization required to execute the transaction.

I was thinking of the same thing you were thinking when I read the headline, but I don't think it's that.

Still super cool though.

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Re:Launch HN: Nala (YC W19) – Internet-Free Mobile Payments ... by benjaminf on Thursday March 14, 2019 @06:24PM (#19394462)

hi! You are right! The cellular protocol we use is called USSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser...

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