Re: A Survey of ILP Account Identifiers?

On 4 December 2016 at 19:55, David Fuelling <dfuelling@sappenin.com> wrote:

> Hey All,
>
> There seems to be several different ways to define the format and
> characteristics of an ILP Ledger Account identifier (e.g., ILP Address,
> email address, URL, etc).
>
> For me, this has led to some confusion as I've tried to reason about when
> and where to use which style of identifier.  So, I created the following
> wiki page to try to and collect my thoughts and formalize my understanding
> of these different proposed identifiers, when to use them, and why:
>
> https://github.com/fluid-money/ilp-connector-java/wiki/
> A-Survey-of-Interledger-Account-Identifiers
>
> While I feel like this has clarified some thing for me, it has prompted a
> few more questions, which I tried to outline in the last section called
> "FAQ" -- I provided some strawman answers and counter-answers in there, but
> I'm curious if anyone has input/opinions/clarifications/corrections about
> what I've put together overall.  Feel free to share your thoughts, and if
> there's any interest I'd be happy to move this page over to the Interledger
> project on Github if people find it useful.
>

Nice work!

The world of identifiers is a tangled web.

General signs of desperation is to create your own protocol / scheme e.g.
acct: was a huge mistake (even the guy that invented it said it was a bad
idea) ... ilp: also looks like it will rely on organic growth, and organic
growth is a hard problem.

Note also that acct: URIs are *not* email addresses (sadly).  The would be
a mailto: URI.

The HTTP URIs are a nice feature, and one of my favourite parts of ILP.
Normally you'd use a fragment identifier to denote a person in a ledger, in
advanced web programming.

Regarding addresses that should be used.  I would say

Use a WebID as your first choice (ie http uri with fragment identifier)
Use other URIs for bootstrapping e.g. bitcoin:1234....

Create a system of lookup to tie key value pairs tied to a URI so that you
can have human readable names to display, email addresses to type in etc.

Thing about identifiers is there are many differing opinions which leads to
a big old mess.

One thing is certain to my mind, the decisions you make on this topic have
a huge influence in determining your competitive advantage!


>
> Thanks,
> david
>