Re: First Draft of Payment Links spec published

Great work Manu thanks for taking the initiative here.

A couple of comments.

The Currency section:

The monetary medium of exchange associated with the
amount<http://payswarm.com/specs/ED/payment-links/2011-10-08/#dfn-amount>.
This value *should* be either an ISO 4217 3 letter currency code, such as
USD, or an IRI pointing to a human and machine-readable description of the
currency, such as http://purl.org/currencies/bitcoin. If the currency is
left out it is assumed that the the base URI of the payment link itself
indicates the currency.

The reason for this being is that the URI is that I would like to encourage
the use of the payment url itself as being the currency descriptor.

The other area is the term "asset". It is a term that means a lot in the
world of banking, accounting etc. A currency itself is an asset. So I think
it would cause confusion to use this term. I have previously used the term
"counter asset" which I don't really like myself. One thing I was thinking
is that the term 'ref' is often used in existing payment systems to
reference whatever the payment is. Again I don't really like it much myself.
But it might be more general purpose. Has anyone else got any ideas?

It would be great to reuse this terminology all the way up through the
payment stack, which is why I think its important to get right.

P

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I've just published a date-stamped Editors Draft for the Payment Links
> specification:
>
> http://payswarm.com/specs/ED/**payment-links/2011-10-08/<http://payswarm.com/specs/ED/payment-links/2011-10-08/>
>
> Abstract:
>
> Online payments have traditionally been initiated in a variety of
> different ways, but contain approximately the same parameters and result
> in roughly the same outcome - the transfer of funds from a sending party
> to a receiving party. The Payment Links specification outlines a
> standard set of IRI parameters for the purposes of transmitting payment
> from a source to a destination. The specification does not cover the
> method of transmission, but rather the initiation of the payment
> process. It is intended as a part of a family of open Internet Payment
> specifications.
>
> The live copy of the document can be found here:
>
> http://payswarm.com/specs/**source/payment-links/<http://payswarm.com/specs/source/payment-links/>
>
> I believe it captures what Pelle suggested in his proposal to the mailing
> list. All thoughts, feedback, suggestions are welcome.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Standardizing Payment Links - Why Online Tipping has Failed
> http://manu.sporny.org/2011/**payment-links/<http://manu.sporny.org/2011/payment-links/>
>
>


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