Re: [webpayments] Abstract payment architecture (#11)

@adrianhopebailie,

> I am closing this issue as there seems to mostly be consensus on the current form of the architecture.

:+1: 

> do you think it's important to standardise payment instrument registration? The way this is done and what is actually stored is very dependent on the payment method.

First, I don't think this is important to do now in the first phase of this work. I do think it is important to do later.

That being said, I'm not talking about the issuing process, rather I'd like to see a standard Payment Instrument format and API that would enable this flow:

1. User visits issuer website and goes through some method-specific issuing process.
2. Issuer calls a browser API and gives the User a Payment Instrument that can be used within any Payment App that supports its method. The Payment Instrument has some basic standard format that is extensible to cover the needs of all payment method specific data.
3. A Payment App can later call an API to request previously issued Payment Instruments from the user.

There would likely be some (**hand-waving**) standard tokenization process that would occur somewhere in the above flow.

This pushes all of the payment method issuance-specific stuff to one place: the issuer's application. It also removes the need for users to perform registration more than once and allows their instruments to travel with them and be easily shared with their Payment Apps. It removes all of the registration overhead from Payment App devs and any need for those devs to create screens or N various back channel flows to obtain a user's Payment Instruments.

I think some portion of the above may also have overlap with what a potential Verifiable Claims/Identity Credentials group works on in the future. Anyway, as I said earlier, I don't think we need to consider any of this now, but it's good to know we're not making choices that could block the ability to work on it later.

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https://github.com/w3c/webpayments/issues/11#issuecomment-163666324