Ultrasonic Payments

#1

Post by ofou » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 1:26 AM UTC

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#2

Post by zinekeller » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:12 AM UTC

Interesting experiment, although it seems that most of Asia has settled on NFC (card emulation or token), QR, and 2D barcodes for offline (at least to customers) payments, which is more practical to deploy using existing infrastructure. I know Tez (aka Google Pay in India which was pushed in other countries) has implemented it, but Indians does Google Pay still have ultrasonic transfers?

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#3

Post by kretaceous » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

Slightly tangent: Charlie Gerard's website is full of interesting experiments like this in the Computer-Human-Interaction space!,

Recommended.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#4

Post by veb » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:17 AM UTC

This is such a cool experiment. Anything that involves sound like this is extremely interesting to me (I have a cochlear implant). Maybe I can hack it so I know when people are making payments :D

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#5

Post by pixel_tracing » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:18 AM UTC

I think it’s cool but with payments you’ll have to address security considerations. How can you prevent someone from spoofing a transaction or spoofing audio for payments?

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#6

Post by veb » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

kretaceous wrote: post #3

Slightly tangent: Charlie Gerard's website is full of interesting experiments like this in the Computer-Human-Interaction space!, Recommended.

You weren't wrong! Reminds me a lot of Gwern's website (https://gwern.net/)

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#7

Post by abetusk » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:24 AM UTC

Ah, it looks like the repo linked in the article should actually be from their personal account, not their stripe account [0].

It also looks like one of the key components is the `quiet.js` library [1] which itself is an emscriptem port of `libquiet` [2].

[0] https://github.com/charliegerard/ultrasonic-payments

[1] https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js/

[2] https://github.com/quiet/quiet

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#8

Post by tambourine_man » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:26 AM UTC

I find it all fascinating, but at the same time, a bit sad that we must resort to such hacks in order to have an interoperable medium.

It should be easy to send packages wirelessly across devices of different platforms in 2022.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#9

Post by kkarty » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:28 AM UTC

will it cause issues with receiver when multiple senders try to send at the same time? Wont it cause chaos in the sound waves ?

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#10

Post by jackson1442 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

pixel_tracing wrote: post #5

I think it’s cool but with payments you’ll have to address security considerations. How can you prevent someone from spoofing a transaction or spoofing audio for payments?

This specific demo doesn't actually send payment data over audio, just a link to pay from. Post-payment would still go though signed stripe webhooks like a normal online payment.

Seems like an interesting way to start a transaction without needing to buy any specialized equipment.