Re: Just off the wire

+1

Stephane, it might be useful for the W3C to issue its own "media advisory"
to frame things for bloggers/journalists. It is, in fact, rather difficult
for those who are tangential to the structured and contextually-constrained
W3C process to write about it in a way that will map fully to how it ought
to have been said, in the views of direct participants.

Joseph Potvin

On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 7:11 AM, Stephane Boyera <boyera@w3.org> wrote:

>
>
>  Was kind of confused after reading that!
>>
> in case you want to know, I'm also confused. We had a good interview with
> the guy, but the overall output is misleading in many ways imho.
> Obviously the point that anything will be done before sept 2017 is a
> complete misunderstanding. This is the date of the end of the group.
>
> the message I've tried to make and didn't get through is that:
> *the group is not setup to standardize bitcoin or crypto-currencies in
> general
> *the objective is to enable more easily payments with bitcoin and alike as
> a payment instrument, together with other legacy instruments
> *the group is likely to focus first on the major issues e-commerce is
> facing today: fraud and card abandonment. This is were the need is, this is
> were the demand is and this is were we have resources in the group as of
> now. wallet is one way for of adressing this
>
> I'm surely convinced that bitcoin and crypto-currencies are the major
> innovation in payment in the last decade. But at this point in time, I feel
> it is still in the innovation space, and not yet in the standardization
> space. I'm sure the time will come, but I've not seen yet any major player
> coming to the group with specific needs for standardization.
>
> steph
>
>  I do feel that the charter and use cases are underweight crypto
>> currencies.  Those document read like the group is unaware either that
>> crypto currencies exist, or that it is the major innovation payments in
>> the last decade.  Not all together accurate, but neither a million miles
>> away from the mark.
>>
>> It's not all that clear how much of a role there is for crypto currency
>> work in this group, or how welcome it would be.  As someone working in
>> this area, I'd like to follow this work, but am unsure how much or how
>> little to participate in the core discussion.
>>
>> The piece didnt really go in to the fact that very few crypto firms have
>> engaged the payments group.  Either as W3C members, as individuals on
>> the mailing list (although Amir has posted a few times), or at the
>> workshop.  This group has been publicized well on bitcoin mailing lists.
>>
>> The web is generally open ended enough for there to be a place in the
>> standard for crypto currencies, even though it's not explicitly stated.
>>
>> Personally I will probably take 80% of the work done here, and create
>> 20% a new standard that should be closely compatible with w3c payments,
>> work with bitcoin and other cryptos, and hopefully be a basis for v2 of
>> the spec.  But that's probably looking at sometime closer to 2020 ...
>> hopefully more btc people will engage during this time, indeed, I've had
>> conversations with core devs in the last week about a documenting
>> RESTful APIs which are starting to go into the core in the next weeks.
>>
>>
>>
> --
> Stephane Boyera        stephane@w3.org
> W3C                +33 (0) 6 73 84 87 27
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> France
>
>