First is the arrival of PIVX Mobile wallets. The second is a POS (Point Of Sale) terminal that is well underway and should complete soon. Combined, these 2 advances provide the infrastructure necessary for PIVX to be used exactly as it is designed to be – as a common currency for Private, Instant, Verified Transactions!
However, people and technology are 2 completely different things, and these tools alone are nowhere near enough to fuel merchant adoption. Over time, it will get easier and easier for PIVX to penetrate the market with merchants accepting it as payment for coffee, or lunch, or clothing etc. Until then, and to get things started, we need to leverage our resources, work smarter, not harder, and add the ‘human factor’ into the equation. Only then can we move past the ‘chicken and egg’ scenario preventing real-world adoption from taking off.
To facilitate that, just a couple of months ago, members of the PIVX Community hired Simon to be our Project Manager of Merchant Adoption. Simon is a recent Business Administration graduate from George Brown College in Toronto. He has incredible people skills and is equally comfortable in a technical environment mentoring teenagers and young adults at SimCoLab.org about 3D Printing and CAD. This blend of business and technical aptitude with people skills, will serve PIVX well bringing more and more merchants on-board.
Simon is working out of the coworking facility called TheCreativeSpace.ca along side Chad and Dan from RhubarbMedia.ca, as well as Hanna who has been working hard to translate PIVX.org into many languages. Also located there are Eric and Grant from PIVX as well as many other people invested in PIVX. This active group of PIVians has quickly brought Simon up to speed on all things PIVX. Further, when combined with the many other individuals working in this facility, it represents a large group of people that can ‘Flash Mob’ local merchants in different ways to drive them along the path to PIVX adoption in the market place. This will be a small but very significant start to a ‘grass roots’ movement we want to replicate everywhere.
We’ve got many different unique ways planned to spur adoption of the PIVX POS device, and the first of them is what we call ‘Paper PIV’. While not yet complete, we expect that beta trials to distribute ‘Paper PIV’ in the downtown core here to start in just a couple of weeks. When complete, it will be easy for any individual or group in the PIVX community to use anywhere.
Functionally, ‘Paper PIV’ it is a paper wallet designed to give amounts of PIV to unfamiliar people. It can be used in a variety of settings, but the main goal is to add it along with a regular tip at a restaurant. An expiry date on the ‘Paper PIV’ makes it easy to recover funds from any PaperPIV that were discarded. Over time, the staff at establishments we tip will become familiar with PIVX, and chat with their co-workers about it. That makes it a whole lot easier to approach their management to move them to the next adoption step.
Simon can be reached at @fused_helios on Slack, and at [email protected].
