BITT IS THE LOCAL SOFTWARE COMPANY that has been held up as a little bit of Silicon Valley right here in Bimshire, a company we are told ad nauseam that we should admire and hail for bringing the computer age to this country.
The fact that we have no idea what they do or how they do it should not concern us. We should all kneel and hail Bitt.
Bitt needs to get over itself. That is, if it really wants to be successful at fulfilling its slogan of empowering the masses.
It’s a Bitt-er pill to swallow. This young company wants to simultaneously retain its mystique (all of the above included) yet become the people’s payment system, the one we will all turn to instead of going to the ATM for cash or using a debit card, far less a credit card, not to mention a cheque.
Hey, I am all for it, but am not one of the guinea pigs who will go out there and help Bitt break in their system in the real world.
Most people are probably worse than me: they don’t even want to hear about digital Barbados dollars, far less Bitcoin, which, as one writer has said, has a long rap sheet linking it to questionable activity.
But if your eyes glaze over when you read about financial settlement systems and so on, just do yourself a favour and Google the phrase “distributed ledger system”.
Since my readers are all much brighter than me, you will only need to scan a few articles to find out that lots of companies, including the big banks, are looking for the new holy grail which that phrase connotes.
According to one article, “Across the financial ecosystem, banks have been exploring ways that blockchain – the decentralised ledger and technology that powers Bitcoin transactions – could be used to exchange data, assets and currencies.”
“Across the financial ecosystem” is a pretty broad statement: they have been joined by IBM and Intel, as well as JPMorgan, the investment bank, “in the effort to start finding a way to begin using the blockchain, the engine that powers Bitcoin.
However, through the Open Ledger Project, in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, this group is looking to step over bitcoin and find new ways of distributing data, transactions and other sensitive information via the blockchain.”
That was from just one random site, a good one too, called pymnts.com (yes, no vowels, please. Technies can code, but they can’t spell).
Get away from Bitcoin! Is anybody at Bitt reading their own tech sites?
The banking system wants to get as far away from that made-up joke of a currency as fast as possible. I wonder why . . . . Let’s see, invented by a recluse whose word about how much is there to be algorithmically “mined” you just have to believe, and used by the Silk Road underworld figures to buy everything illegal on the “dark ’net”.
So the financial system that operates in the sunlight wants to use the platform but not the Bitcoin, and that is the test.
However, with all those big companies on the job, not to mention eager and very bright start-ups like Bitt, I am sure we Average Joes, who just want to pay our bills, will be brought into this new system in coming years, and perhaps be better protected from the fraud that is causing financial grief to so many people.
Bitt is in a great position to reap these benefits because they are coming up with the software that presumably takes into account the realities of Caribbean trading, and therefore will be a worthy add-on to the big systems when they come onstream.
For their sake, I hope it all pays off in the end for them and their Trini investors.
But it’s time to get rid of the “high priest of tech” image if you want to convince the small consumer like me to believe in your products and services. I stopped making financial decisions based on a company’s mystique a long time ago.
Except of course when it comes to Apple.
