Monzo to Monzo payment

[Juless (Julian Muzyczka)]

If I was to make a monzo to monzo payment using bluetooth, will it be necessary for either or both parties to be online.

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

You can send payments by Bluetooth?

If you both have payments with friends turned on then you can select them from your contact list

[HoddzDJ]

Short answer, yes. You both need to be on the nearby friends page.

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Oh I’d forgotten that feature

[Juless (Julian Muzyczka)]

Thank you for the reply. The reason I ask is that it seems to me that we do not have, in the West, a system which transfers bank credits without needing to be online. Although bluetooth transfer appears to be peer to peer, it’s still not clear whether a third party (ie Monzo) is involved in the actual transaction. In a true peer to peer transaction, there wouldn’t need to be an “online” requirement. This would effectively replace cash transactions. In the payments by bluetooth option, the use of the Nearby Friends page may just be there to authenticate/ validate recipients and donors. So it’s still unclear as to how the Monzo app is working with regards to peer to peer transactions. Any help would be appreciated.

[caspararemi (Caspar)]

Isn’t the app, and an internet connection, required so that the money physically moves from one account to the other? If it was simply a local P2P transaction, there’d be no central record of the exchange.

[tommy5dollar (Tommy Long)]

You need to be online. Without being online the only proof that the transaction took place is on the sender’s and the recipient’s devices. Without some sort of advanced cryptographic solution what would happen if the two devices disagreed?

[Juless (Julian Muzyczka)]

That’s my question. There’s isn’t a “central record” when cash transactions occur. Can the Monzo app move bank credits from one device to another via hard link/ bluetooth independently of the central Monzo bank? If this is the case then the app could function as a crypto-wallet; sending and receiving bank credits from itself to others’ devices without a third party (Monzo Bank, in this case) intervention/ validation. I suspect that it doesn’t for reasons similar to what tommy5dollar said below.

[Ordog]

If you didn’t need to be online then I could send someone £1,000,000 (because Monzo can’t check to see if I have it in my account) and then you’d give me my Bugatti and off I’d go.

When you went online next you’d see that you’ve not actually received any money yet I have a car.

I believe crypto currency transactions need to be online as well to verify it in the blockchain.

[joeldrapper]

And yet you can write a cheque offline. I don’t see why you couldn’t have a P2P offline payment system that mirrors the functionality of a cheque. The payment could be cryptographically signed by the sender, and then cleared (like a cheque) as soon as the receiver goes online and passes the digital “cheque” to Monzo who can move the funds if available.

[Ordog]

Or… you could just go online to send payment

[joeldrapper]

Sure, it doesn’t really make sense as a feature in the U.K. where we have internet mostly everywhere.

[Ordog]

Your idea sounds cool though, sometimes you do have an outage or poor coverage but in the grand scheme of things I think it would be a huge amount of work for little gain