Re: On Interoperability

A very good point and that is where I and many others think OpenTransact
can really shine.

To avoid centralization, I prefer it starting informally through a smaller
network of payment providers, learning from that and creating more
formalized structures probably based on Ripple afterwards.

OpenTransact is already well represented in the community currency space
and will hopefully be more so in the next year. Several people in the UK
community currency space are working on creating more formal networks
between each other already.

P

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com>wrote:

> On 12 January 2012 19:37, Pelle Braendgaard <pelle@stakeventures.com>
> wrote:
> > OpenTransact is all about interoperability. That is why it was created. I
> > have been quite perplexed to be honest where this comes from.
> >
> > It is not just library interoperability.
> >
> > It is trusting that my application can work with many different
> providers.
> >
> > It is allowing people to create new interesting derivative open transact
> > services on top of existing services.
> >
> > It is also about letting me bring my transactions with me and maintain
> them
> > in a separate app.
> >
> > However as I understand it the very narrow definition of Interoperability
> > that Manu believes we don't support is:
> >
> > I want to pay someone from my PayPal account and having it show up in my
> > Moms Dwolla account.
> >
> > http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/#interoperability
> >
> > Just like when you in a bank can send money from one bank to another.
> >
> > Before I start going through the issues here. I would like to ask where
> > PaySwarm specifically specifies how to move money from one payment
> provider
> > to another? I can not find it in the spec.
> >
> > What we realize though is that there are many different ways payment
> > services can interoperate.
> >
> > This is not as simple as defining a protocol. There are many different
> > issues here.
> >
> > Like how do I as PayPal move money to Dwolla? That is not an API issue.
> >
> > Traditionally in the US you can abstract that away to banks via the ACH
> > network and SWIFT internationally.
> >
> > PayPal and Dwolla both use ACH to move money between peoples bank
> accounts.
> >
> > The way money is moved in banking has traditionally been through banks
> > maintaining "nostro" accounts within each other.
> >
> > So if I have an account with CitiBank and want to send $20 to someone in
> > Wells Fargo. Citi would credit Well's Fargos nostro account $20 and tell
> > them to send it to their customers account. Chase would charge Citibanks
> > nostro account $20 and move that into their customers account.
> >
> > Every now and then (in the old days) you would have to physically move
> money
> > or gold to maintain good nostro account levels.
> >
> > This was later modernized by having central banks deal with such
> movements
> > in a centralized ledger, so individual banks didn't have to have
> connections
> > with everyone.
> >
> > In a web payment 1.0 world PayPal and Dwolla use ACH to abstract away
> all of
> > that.
> >
> > In a web payment 2.0 world without ACH things are different. We want to
> move
> > money between two of possibly thousands of payment providers, we need
> either
> > a distributed graph of connected payment providers each with "nostro"
> > accounts with each other or a few central players.
> >
> > I like the distributed graph model myself. The most important proposal in
> > this space is Ryan Fuggers Ripple project http://ripple-project.org/
> >
> > There is actually an OpenTransact implementation of it called Rivulet
> here:
> >
> > https://github.com/jplewicke/rivulet
> >
> > These are currently all based on a central graph database. But the ideas
> > could definitely be implemented in a distributed way using OpenTransact.
>
> Just a question about this (hopefully related to interoperability).
>
> Why use a central graph database when the Web is already a highly
> scalable distributed graph database, with namespaces?
>
> >
> > The point of all of this is interoperability can mean a lot of things.
> Also
> > that sending money from one institution to another is not quite as
> simple as
> > it is made out.
> >
> > P
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://picomoney.com - Like money, just smaller
> > http://stakeventures.com - My blog about startups and agile banking
>



-- 
http://picomoney.com - Like money, just smaller
http://stakeventures.com - My blog about startups and agile banking