We have been covering the Mintchip story since April of 2012 when the Royal Canadian Mint made a commercial advertising it and challenging software programmers to make an app that will be used in conjunction with it.  The commercial portrays Mintchip as the ‘evolution of currency’, tries to portray it as our inevitable future.  The commercial describes Mintchip as a digital form of currency. Value is recorded on MicroSD cards in smart phones, tablets or laptop/desktop computers because it can also be loaded onto chips found in USB sticks.  In the commercial it also states that some future devices might also be compatible with it that are not even invented yet.
Click HERE for Mintchip commercial mentioned above.

Jan Hannemann, an app developer, along with many other recipients entered the Mintchip challenge that was portrayed in the commercial.  Hannemann’s idea, MintWallet, made him win the grand prize of $50,000 for best application. His goal was to make virtual currency to be “like instant messaging for your wallet.” Using cloud technology and push notifications, users could use MintChips for payments, for literally pretty much anything.

“Winning app MintWallet allows users to send money, or requests for money to other users. It relies on a peer-to-peer network to connect users and allow the transfer of digital cash. It ties in QR codes so every payment request will have a QR code automatically generated. That allows payment usages such as scanning the code at a parking meter to pay for your time at a spot. There’s also a “split the bill” feature so a group eating out together at a restaurant can quickly pay their share without any hassle.”
~ SOURCE

MiniCheckout is another popular choice winner for the MintChip Challenge which allows users with Mintchip technology to scan items they are purchasing from a grocery store (or other place) by taking a picture of the barcode and paying for everything they buy digitally through the smart phone.  This kind of correlates to IBM’s commercial where it portrays a man just shoving grocery items into his pockets and he just walks out of the store because everything is automatically deducted from his chip.

So what’s the difference between debit cards and mintchip?

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