Restricted wallets
Money that can only be spent on what it was given for, enforced at the posting rather than trusted to the recipient — so a school allowance buys school things.
Parents sending allowances, employers paying expenses, NGOs distributing aid, government programmes and cooperatives.
Built, tested and switched off. It is a function of an issuer or an acquirer, so it stays off until the corresponding authorisation is recorded, or until an authorised institution operates it on the platform. Nothing here is offered to a customer meanwhile. This service will be available after the authorisation of the Banque Centrale du Congo; it is switched off by the administrator
The problem
Money given for school fees, medicine or seed is fungible the moment it lands. The usual controls are receipts collected afterwards, which is slow, humiliating and easy to defeat.
How it works
- Create a restricted wallet and say what it may be spent on — which merchants, which categories.
- Fund it like any other wallet.
- A purchase outside the restriction is refused at the posting, not flagged afterwards.
- The holder sees what the wallet is for, so a refusal is understood rather than mysterious.
What you can check
Facts about the running platform rather than adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, the API reference or the ledger.
- The restriction is enforced as a posting policy, so a purchase outside it is refused rather than recorded and reviewed later.
- The holder can see the restriction, so a refusal explains itself instead of looking like a fault.
- A restricted wallet is a wallet on the same ledger, with the same statements and the same reconciliation.
- Restrictions are configuration on the wallet, so a programme can change what is permitted without a release.
What it costs
No charge for creating or holding restricted wallets. Payments from them carry the ordinary rate.
Questions
Is this not paternalistic?
It can be, and whoever creates the wallet should think about that. It is also what makes some money exist at all: an employer, a donor or a programme that cannot give cash can often give restricted funds. The alternative is frequently nothing rather than unrestricted money.
What does the holder see?
What the wallet is for. A refusal then explains itself — "this wallet is for school expenses" — instead of looking like a broken payment, which is the difference between a control and an indignity.
Can the restriction be changed later?
Yes, by whoever administers the wallet. It is configuration, so a programme can widen or narrow what is permitted without waiting for a software release.
Read next
Wallets and transfers
A transfer between two accounts is one balanced posting on a double-entry ledger, not a message between two systems that might later disagree.
Virtual cards
A card number for the sites that only take cards, issued against your own balance, with the card details never stored by BitriPay in a form that could be taken from it.
Goal savings
Savings kept in a separate balance with a named goal, so the money is out of the way of daily spending — and described honestly as a set-aside balance rather than an interest-bearing account.