Re: Web Payments comparison: PaySwarm vs. OpenTransact

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Pelle Braendgaard
<pelle@stakeventures.com> wrote:

> "With OpenTransact we are still discussing how to specify
> recurring payments. Before we add it to the standard we would
> like a couple of real world implementations experiment with it."

my suggestion is, explicitly put them out of scope, and suggest that
creators of calendaring software support initiating transactions. For
extra points, actually provide a patch to, for instance -- hey, did
you know freshmeat.net has rebranded? --
http://freecode.com/projects/event-calendar that initiates an OT
transaction as a subclass of whatever it does for reminder messages.

> "transfers of assets"
zigging or zagging, I prefer to talk about "making book entries"
rather than pretending that our book entries are assets. Without
completely refactoring OT's terminology, though, this is a fundamental
difference between Pelle and myself.

Big Picture:
the payswarm people apparently are attempting to solve a different
problem, and may be trying to use a standards body for marketing
purposes, such as occurred with VXML, which codified some
interoperability rules between several competing vendors, creating a
barrier to entry for new players. OT can't fit into that as anything
more than an alternative syntax for initiating transactions, competing
with ACH, which uses routing number/account number for user identifier
or PayPal, which uses e-mail address for user identifier. It seems to
me that getting OT mentioned in the payswarm final deliverable
document would be a win. I believe the IETF has some kind of payments
standard group, or they had one once upon a time, and my
recommendation is to prepare an RFC document fully describing the
syntax and scope of OT and submit that completely independently of
anything else, so it can be referred to by other things as a fixed
point.

The interbank ACH infrastructure is not a shopping cart, nor is the
PGP format is not a keyserver. Nor is anything else something which it
is not.

Received on Wednesday, 21 December 2011 22:41:52 UTC