I don't buy the argument that it's "turtles all the way down". Trust begins and ends at the chip level. I think its possible to make an open root of trust chip better than any solution on the market available today. I think the chips available on the market today are good enough for this specific application but not others.

The point of this I thought is to unify the virtual system with a physical product, in the pretty cash. So it isn’t just the chip now, is it? Otherwise why not just... use a hardware wallet and use bitcoin ?

I do agree that people can’t picture or visualize in their mind a “bitcoin”, and so this solves that part. But then you’re left with the, how do people print this tangible pretty currency part.

The point is physical cash is really important to a functioning society.

Cryptocurrencies are turning out to be really important but lack a physical cash instrument.

Kong marries the two.

Kong accomplishes that by minimizing trust down to the chip level - as opposed to the firmware or application level - so we can make these things trustlessly and cost effectively. Something like a Trezor is too expensive and dear to be treated like physical cash.

That’s why we have physical cash.

It already has all the benefits of physical crypto with less headache.

So kind of like how Samsung and HTC are starting to integrate hardware wallets into the phones?

Couldn’t you imagine a world where this starts trending cheaper and cheaper and soon becomes a commodity ?

Kong is radical in that it only stores keys on the secure element and only stores code in the EVM.

Kong is a toy implementation of this idea, but I think it's a very powerful idea.

The difference is a crypto wallet on your Samsung phone when lost or stolen makes you bankrupt where google pay wallets shrug it off.

And has the potential of being tracked by said companies and service providers

Whereas your crypto transactions are literally published on a digital distributed ledger for all to see including those self same companies. I thought the transparent, digital, decentralized public ledger was the big reason to use it?

Further, I'd suggest you read up on NFC and tokenization, it's not true that the companies in question actually do get access to that information unless they have separate-from-the-technology arrangements with payment processors.

In either case I'd rather be tracked than bankrupt.

> The point is physical cash is really important to a functioning society.

Not really. There's a couple northern european economies that are almost entirely cashless.

"Less cash but not cashless" is the motto of those northern european countries.

Both the UK and the Netherlands for instance have issue reports[1][2] to ensure cash does not go away as it serves a vital purpose for protected classes.

[1] https://www.accesstocash.org.uk/media/1087/final-report-fina... - from the UK report "17% of the population would struggle in a cashless society"

[2]https://www.dnb.nl/en/binaries/DNB%20Payments%20Strategy%202... - from the DNB report "While we support the retailers’ and banks’ wish to encourage electronic payments, we do not seek to achieve a cashless society..."

I'm talking Sweden where it is next to impossible to pay with cash in most places. And impossible to find an ATM.