Square's new payee identifier: cashtags

"cashtags" have been used on Twitter for some time to denote stock ticker
symbols.
Example: $MSFT for Microsoft.

Now Square have adopted the concept for their p2p payments platform cash.me
https://cash.me/

They are, very cleverly, telling users to:

   1. "claim their cashtag" (Example: https://cash.me/$wikipedia)
   2. tell other people to "cash me with my cashtag"

So they are promoting a whole new vocabulary which may never take on but
what might is the idea of a payee identifier in the form of a "cashtag".

In the same way that the identifier @ahopebailie is normally understood to
mean https://twitter.com/ahopebailie I assume they are hoping the world
starts to associate $wikipedia with https://cash.me/$wikipedia

i.e. Here's another namespace specific identifier (tied to cash.me) that
has potentially taken ownership of the symbol "$" as a prefix which implies
a namespace.

It does make me think that an identifier like adrian$hopebailie.com could
be a cool standard though and would imply that my IdP is at hopebailie.com
and my identity key is "adrian".

Would this solve the endless debate around using email style addresses? I
doubt it

Received on Thursday, 26 March 2015 12:57:08 UTC