Re: Payments and Trust

On 28 September 2012 00:57, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I do think that there is a technology solution for the Web Payments
> > problem (creating an open, decentralized, payment mechanism for the
> > Web). I do not think that there is a technology "solution" for the trust
> > network problem because it is constantly evolving. That is, your trust
> > network is only good until it gets gamed. Building something that is
> > game-proof is going to have to be an iterative, long-term effort. An
> > effort that has no end. It's certainly something worth attempting, but
> > definitely not something that should be standardized at any point in the
> > near future.
>
> Just to pointlessly (?) give away more trade-secret-quality in-house
> theory, the "trust problem" can't be solved, but it /can/ be modeled,
> by providing a way for individuals to quantify trust in other
> individuals.
>
> In the tipjar marketplace vision, where vendors only accept their own
> scrip, a vendor sells their scrip at par (one euro of
> bonegan-muzikon-vendejo.com script is sold by bonegan muzikon vendejo
> for one euro) so someone who wants to purchase tunes from bonegan
> muzikon vendejo can exchange what they have, through the market, for
> bonegan muzikon vendejo script. Trust comes into it when the customer
> doesn't have any euros in their account, but they've got whatever they
> have instead, including their own scrip and other things they might
> hold. Let's say Joe Consumer only has his own scrip, which is
> redeemable for an hour of drunken consultation on any topic, realities
> of scheduling and travel permitting. (I think many people reading this
> mailing list would be able to find a small market such a scrip.) Joe
> needs music store scrip, so he sells some consultation scrip to those
> who have expressed trust in Joe by offering euros or things that can
> be converted to euros for Joe scrip.
>
> Ta-daah! Just disintermediated most bank loan infrastructure.
>

Very nice!

I think one of the final pieces of the puzzle here is 'credit limits'.

Alice trusts Bob ... but only to the tune of 10 euros.  Higher limits need
to be negotiated.

This can work for individuals or groups.

So I keep coming back to this idea of overlays.  It's exactly how the web
is supposed to work.  A basic data foundation with more and more getting
built on top.  Think about it, when the web was introduced there was no
document search.  Tim did this intentionally, so that some one else
specializing in search could build on top, hence google.

But fitting overlays together you can build a stronger and stronger
system.  So we can have many reputation overlays.  This gives opportunity
for others to build trust inferences.  Just as in the centralized model a
bank checks your credit score.

You can overlay credit limits which start to allow the creation of new
money -- good money drives out bad!

Payswarm is an overlay as is tipjar as is opentransact, ripple and bitcoin
otc can be too.  The idea is to make tweaking systems to make them additive
rather than competative

I think we now have the technology to do trust and credit lines (very
similar to webredits) and IOUs.  I think we're almost at the point were we
just need to join the dots and make great UIs!