next big thing, right? Cyr Joshua Cyr: Yeah, for us here in the United States, it’s still kind of a new concept. So it’s important to realize that most of the rest of the world is using mobile payments and mobile wallets pretty heavily right now. But, right, we’re seeing all kinds of stuff be pushed out. Including now, in the US, we are required to have this, what’s called Real ID, a government issued ID that proves that we’re who we say we are. In order to get through like airports, essentially. So, we’re carrying around this driver’s license that’s got a little gold star on the top right corner, and you hope you never lose that. Because if it gets in the wrong hands, all of a sudden, they have your name, your date of birth, your address, your face, and these days, we’re using our biometrics, we’re using facial identification to, you know, unlock our phones and things like that. So in a digital age, you’re kind of stuck carrying around this little piece of plastic and you’ve got this little piece of paper with interesting things on them and we don’t want our IDs to be compelled, even if we were being apprehended by the police during a routine traffic stop because if, as a criminal or bad actor gets ahold of your driver’s license right, hasn’t confiscated identity theft, does whatever other horrible things with it Governor John Lynch in 2007 and then our biometrics actually made an identity theft criminal out of every single person with a driver’s license in New Hampshire. And, he didn’t have to. And so, yeah, I mean, it’s just kind of crazy that the existence of all of this stuff. And so if you think of mobile wallets as nothing more than our digital identity, mobile payment system built into the phone that is not necessarily broadcasting any public information. And it’s something that can be used to make a payment, transfer of property, open a door in my case at my house. It’s super cool. And they’re all running on the blockchain. And so when We talk about this identity security, I could lose my physical wallet, obviously, right? I could lose my what was my leather case, and I could go to some authority like a DMV and get that ID back. I could have that waiting period or the mailed wait overnight or whatever. But that’s temporary because all the information that is printed on your typical US driver’s license is exactly the information that bad actors need, right? I have a business down the Cape. And there’s a hotel down there called Chatham Bars Inn. And they literally, to book a room at their hotel, they literally cancel this out and you’re gonna die laughing. They ask for the address on the driver’s license that we are giving them so that they can mail us a confirmation slip. So, I mean, talk about being tone-deaf to the situation of data breaches like that’s crazy. Flo Nicolas: So, just to clarify, when you say mobile wallet, is it something that is an app on my phone? Cyr Joshua Cyr: Right, exactly. So it’s just an app on your phone. Just like you would probably have Google Pay installed if you have an Android, or you’ve got, of course, Apple Pay, if you have an iPhone and if you click pay at any store, that it may or may not support that technology, right? And you would walk up to an NFC scanning device, and certain cases it would just do that magic, and money would go here, here, and here. And it’s an amazing thing. But just think now that our wallets are being owned by companies like Apple, right? And we think of Apple, it’s the privacy company. But they own my real identity if I were to register my credit cards with Apple Pay. Or, especially like Google, Google is just watching every single thing I do. Right? And we’ve given them permission to do that. So, I mean, it’s just kind of crazy that we’ve given all of this information to these big tech companies. And so you’re really talking about some of these other companies that are building more open-source blockchain-based wallets that I can now have, they’re growing more and more popular. And so right now, they’re fringe, people are building them for enthusiasts who know what they’re doing with crypto but give it time. Give it time. For example, here at UNH, we’re giving wallets out like candy. Like we want people to have them. You should be able to log into your tuition payments, everything at UNH with a wallet address that holds some digital assets, but that’s our future. That’ll be here faster than you think.
