This bracelet lets you flick your wrist to pay with Bitcoin

Sometimes, there's such a thing as being too forward-thinking. Take MEVU and its prototype payment bracelet as an example: the wrist-worn Bluetooth wallet lets you pay with Bitcoin using only air gestures. Sounds cool, right? In many ways, it is. As the company shows in its demo video, you can flick your wrist to cover parking or donate to charity without ever reaching for your wallet (or your phone, for that matter).

However, it's very much a pie-in-the-sky vision at this point. As you may have noticed, Bitcoin isn't widely accepted online, let alone at retail. As such, you likely won't be waving your arm around to pay at the local coffee shop. Moreover, the current point-of-sale technology is based on iOS -- given that Apple has been removing Bitcoin wallets from the App Store, any practical shopping functions will have to wait for the Android software due in a few months.

Instead, the real promise of the bracelet may be its underlying platform, Alive OS. The open software lets programmers take advantage of wearables with motion, voice and glanceable displays for any purpose; they only need to sign up for a developer preview to get started. The bracelet itself should be available for pre-orders within a month. It's hard to say whether MEVU's software will catch on, but the Bitcoin system is really just a test case -- really, this wristwear can do a lot more.