Re: Vague "Digital Wallet" terminology (was: Re: W3C officially launches Web Payments initiative)

On 19 October 2014 21:02, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> On 10/16/2014 08:52 AM, Anders Rundgren wrote:
> > On 2014-10-15 17:30, Manu Sporny wrote:
> >
> > "The Interest Group will first focus on digital wallets, which many
> > in industry consider an effective way to reduce fraud and improve
> > privacy by having users share sensitive information only with payment
> > providers, rather than merchants"
> >
> > An awesome but also incredibly difficult task.
>
> Keep in mind that just about everyone that read that sentence thought it
> said something different. "Digital wallet" is a loaded marketing term
> that means many different things to many different people. This is why
> we've been arguing against that terminology for a long while in this
> community. Using the term "Digital Wallet" to refer to the work that
> we're doing is about as clear as using the term "Cloud" to define the
> work that the W3C is doing.
>
> For example, many in the mobile industry think of the "digital wallet"
> as something that has stuff that lives inside of a secure element on the
> mobile phone. Industry players that have cloud-based financial services
> think of "digital wallets" as something that doesn't have most of the
> functionality living on the mobile device (because they don't want to be
> shut out of the market since they're not strong players in the mobile
> space).
>
> > It is sad that the W3C spend resources on areas which already are
> > owned by giant players instead of "simply" making on-line payments
> > secure and convenient.
>
> Keep in mind that nothing has been decided on where the W3C will spend
> its time on wrt. Web Payments. That's what the next 3-12 months will be
> about in the Web Payments IG.
>
> > I don't think you necessarily need a wallet for that, you rather
> > need to nuke dated stuff like NSS since it blocks progress for
> > numerous applications (including wallets).
>
> +1, again - "wallet" is a loaded and useless term, but the marketing
> folks seem to like it (and I can see an argument to use it to cast a
> wide net initially). That said, I don't think the technical groups
> should use the term "wallet" because any definition of "wallet" is going
> to be so generic and useless as to not help direct the work. For example:
>
> digital wallet - A piece of software or hardware that is capable of
> initiating an economic transaction, relaying the result of the
> transaction, and storing the result of a transaction. It is also capable
> of storing identity information, loyalty cards, and any other
> tangentially related information that may be used in economic transactions.
>
> The IG would be better off deconstructing the problem into the minimum
> technical requirements to make economic transactions more standardized
> on the Web. Namely:
>
> 1. Identity / Credentials / KYC
> 2. Payment Initiation
> 3. Digital Receipts
>
> ... which is basically where this CG ended up after contemplating the
> "What is a wallet?" discussion over the past 4+ years.
>

By strange coincidence I have spent much of the last week working on a
decentralized Linked Data based digital wallet.

*Definitions*

1. The functions of your *digital wallet* are similar to a traditional
wallet or banking service, namely to see your balance, to transfer funds to
another party, or to make a withdrawl.

2. By *decentralized* I mean that the user can have any profile (URI) to
login, starting with HTTP URIs but will extend to irc, phone, email, and
more.

3. By *Linked Data based* I mean that all the data is recorded in RDF
(retrieved via HTTP GET) and new transactions are sent via ACL'd RDF (over
HTTP PUT).

I'll be testing over the next week or so.  If any technically minded person
with a WebID would like to help test, feel free to ping me :)

Perhaps a working demo can help with the definitions ...


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/
>
>