Re: Registry Services [via Interledger Payments Community Group]

> What you are referring to (I think) is a user experience, that of typing
a url into an input box, rather than, clicking one.  It's clear that users
are not trained to do this, in the same way they have been trained to type
in email addresses at this point in time.

Agreed.


> Facebook use firstname lastname, which is what I think most people are
used to.

There is actually a Facebook group for people with my exact first and last
name with over a hundred members. (Me not being one of them.)

When talking about identity we need to distinguish between unique
identifiers and identifiers that are not unique. You often need both.
Facebook for example also has unique usernames in addition to the firstname
lastname thing, because there are cases where you need to refer to a
specific user, e.g. in Facebook URLs, Facebook emails (yourname@facebook.com,
might be discontinued, don't remember) and Facebook's payments efforts.
Twitter similarly collects both unique (Twitter name) and non-unique
(firstname lastname) usernames. The former are used for mentions and URLs,
the latter are used for search, etc.

My email was solely concerned with unique identifiers. That's just cause I
don't have any strong feelings on different ways to build non-unique
identifiers right now. It also goes into Solid (which I think you're
involved in?) and other decentralized social graph efforts that I don't
know much about.


> To scale payments you need a first class identity system.  Or you'll hit
a wall scaling -- ripple and bitcoin are good examples.  Meaning no
disrespect to either system, both have very cool features, just scalability
is not one of them, when compared with the web.

First off - what do you mean by "scale"? Bitcoin and Ripple don't "scale"
because they can process a limited number of transactions. Adding more
network participants does not add more transaction processing capacity. The
Web and Interledger fall on the other side of the scalability divide.
Adding more ledgers and connectors in Interledger does increase the overall
processing capacity.

Regarding Ripple's and Bitcoin's identity systems I can't see any evidence
that those ran into scalability limits. But even if they did, you'd be
supporting
my argument. Federated names are proven to scale, email and the Web both
use federated names on top of DNS and they are used every day by billions
of users. The burden of proof when it comes to scalability is on any
schemes that propose to do better than DNS.


> I dont know what this is?  Is it an email address?  An acct: URI?  A sip
address?  An xmpp address?  Any number of other addresses.

Does it matter? The identifier X@Y.COM means what it says. "The account X
as managed by Y.COM." If users care about decentralization they can use a
domain they control. And some do. My email address is on a domain I own and
I run my own email server. Most companies use their own domains for email,
not gmail.com and Google offers a version of Gmail (Google Apps) for
exactly that use case.

Is this perfect? No. I'd love a TLD that browsers can look up without even
consulting VeriSign's root zone or any central authority. (Perhaps even
with an officially registered GTLD for DNS backwards compatibility.) I'd
love it if domains and SSL certificates were always free. I'd love for
there to be a decentralized chain of trust all the way down to the SSL
cert. Those are all awesome battles that we should fight.


> Persona is being shut down, imho, due to this bad design decision.

Opinion noted and very much respected.

For reference, here's Mozilla's Persona After Action Report:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR

I definitely agree with this: "We started building a whole identity stack
but it's really hard to do things in a decentralized way."

My experience is that decentralization is 10x harder at least. That doesn't
mean don't do it. But definitely build something simple first and make it
incrementally more decentralized. More generally: Perfect is the enemy of
the good. It doesn't matter what your goal is, whether it's
decentralization or a pretty UI. Build something that at least works, then
improve it.

We can make payments as decentralized as the Web by building Interledger on
the same technology stack. Let's call that option A. If we want to make
Interledger (and the Web and email) more decentralized than that, then imho
we should look at making a more decentralized stack to build on. That means
more decentralized alternatives for DNS (a way to map unique human-readable
identifiers to other values), TCP/IP/BGP/etc. (a way to communicate) and/or
X.509 (the CAs we know and love), which is all very useful work, but I
recommend building an implementation of Interledger on the web stack first.
It's the quickest thing we can actually ship and still a huge improvement
over payments today.

As for improving DNS and TCP/IP - I think there are interesting mutual
dependencies here. From talking to CJD (of cjdns fame) many years ago I
learned that incentive issues are fundamental to many truly decentralized
systems. That's why Bitcoin, Ripple and Ethereum have currencies built-in.
It's one of the only ways to prevent DoS and manage resource
allocation/prioritization in a fully decentralized way. Interledger in
principle can be used as a truly decentralized payment method (if you make
a super-pure version that rests on cryptographic keys only, no URIs and no
human-readable anything.) On top of that you can build a decentralized
blockchain, mesh network or other fully decentralized system. Let's call
this option B. This is the only way I know of to solve incentive issues in
a fully decentralized system without creating a currency. (And in case it's
not obvious why that's attractive, after six years of trying to take two
different currency-based systems mainstream, please believe me when I say
it's a nightmare. People just end up being invested in one currency or
another and rationality goes right out the window.)

I want to work on option A right now, because that's how I personally think
I can impact the most people in the shortest amount of time. It doesn't
mean that I wouldn't want to contribute to option B also or on the side.
But I believe that B will take longer.


> Webfinger isnt far behind it.

Definitely not married to Webfinger. But X@Y.COM style identifiers are the
only ones I can think of that 1) users are used to typing and that 2) a
browser can easily map to a URI. And Webfinger is a perfectly
straightforward way to do that mapping. If there is a better alternative to
Webfinger I'm all ears.


> Why not just use WebID?

Sure, I only didn't consider it because I don't know it very well. What
does a WebID identifier look like when you type it and what is the process
for mapping it to an Interledger account URI?

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 6:51 PM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On 11 February 2016 at 03:21, Stefan Thomas <stefan@ripple.com> wrote:
>
>> Here are my two cents on the identifier issue:
>>
>> Right now in the ILP prototype, destinations are expressed as URIs. From
>> OpenID we know that exposing the user to URIs as identifiers was a terrible
>> user experience that users strongly reject.
>>
>
> Using URIs is a great way to scale.
>
> Not sure this characterization is accurate.  Users see URIs all the time,
> for example hyperlinks, and in the address bar.  What you are referring to
> (I think) is a user experience, that of typing a url into an input box,
> rather than, clicking one.  It's clear that users are not trained to do
> this, in the same way they have been trained to type in email addresses at
> this point in time.  Your language indicates you have strong view on this
> topic, further discussion my not prove fruitful, let's see. :)
>
>
>>
>> At Ripple we used to have identifiers like
>> this: rHb9CJAWyB4rj91VRWn96DkukG4bwdtyTh and we introduced Ripple names
>> which look like this: ~bob (pronounced "ripple Bob")
>>
>> This might look reminiscent of Twitter usernames (@bob) or Square
>> cashtags ($bob), which is no coincidence - the colleague
>> <https://angel.co/gregkidd> who strongly advocated for these names at
>> Ripple was also a first round investor in Twitter and an advisor at Square.
>>
>
> Facebook use firstname lastname, which is what I think most people are
> used to.
>
>
>>
>> The lesson I took away from that whole experience was that creating a
>> namespace like that without a central operator is hard. Namecoin is trying
>> to do it, we were trying to do it, I'm strongly against making either
>> effort a dependency of Interledger.
>>
>
> That's where the web can help, it is good at namespaces.
>
>
>>
>> That leaves the "next best thing" which is federated identifiers.
>> [username]@[domain.com] Email uses them, OpenID Connect adopted them in
>> their OpenID Connect Discovery spec
>> <https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html>. Ripple used
>> them as a hack <https://wiki.ripple.com/Federation_protocol> while we
>> were working on Ripple names. They were extremely easy to build, developers
>> had an easy enough time adopting them, they are the most decentralized
>> thing that is actually production-ready and users have an ok time using
>> them.
>>
>
> I dont know what this is?  Is it an email address?  An acct: URI?  A sip
> address?  An xmpp address?  Any number of other addresses.  There's a
> scalability point of failure right there.  Let's say it's an email
> address.  We're back to the centralized model where the big email providers
> dominate.  Can we do better?
>
>
>>
>> Identity is very hard and I applaud anyone who is working to create
>> better solutions. But I've learned not to make a new identity protocol a
>> dependency of your new payments protocol.
>>
>
> I feel the opposite.  To scale payments you need a first class identity
> system.  Or you'll hit a wall scaling -- ripple and bitcoin are good
> examples.  Meaning no disrespect to either system, both have very cool
> features, just scalability is not one of them, when compared with the web.
>
>
>>
>> For any peer-to-peer payment solution on top of Interledger *today* that
>> requires an identifier, I would recommend an [account]@[ledger domain]
>> looking thing, e.g. bob@superpay.com which resolves to an ILP URI via
>> webfinger. With any luck the scheme will get popular enough such that email
>> providers let you set a wallet provider and your actual bob@gmail.com
>> email address will redirect to your wallet. I'm fully aware of the awesome
>> work that Manu Sporny, Mozilla (Persona) and many others have been doing on
>> a scheme that doesn't require cooperation from the domain holder (Gmail in
>> this case), but I don't think those efforts are production-ready today. The
>> same goes for decentralized identity networks like Namecoin and identi.fi
>> .
>>
>
> Persona is being shut down, imho, due to this bad design decision.
> Webfinger isnt far behind it.  Why not just use WebID?  It's best of breed
> in this class.  I suspect the usual biases will kick in at this point.  But
> I'm more than happy to let implementations do the talking on this one.
>
>
>>
>> If you disagree, you don't have to convince me or anyone else, you just
>> have to build a prototype of a protocol on top of ILP using whatever
>> identifier you think is better. Once we have both options implemented,
>> it'll be easier to decide which one we like.
>>
>
> Working on it! :)
>
>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 3:48 AM, W3C Community Development Team <
>> team-community-process@w3.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Are there discussions around registry services ? I assume to handle
>>> transactions
>>> across ledger, one needs to identify the addresses and the ledgers. To
>>> interface
>>> with existing ledgers, we would need account number, servicing bank
>>> identifier
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Stephane
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ----------
>>>
>>> This post sent on Interledger Payments Community Group
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 'Registry Services'
>>>
>>> https://www.w3.org/community/interledger/2016/02/10/registry-services/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Learn more about the Interledger Payments Community Group:
>>>
>>> https://www.w3.org/community/interledger
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>