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.
>

It might be easier to explain how I do this.

My identifer is a primary key which is an HTTP URI.  In general it is
hidden from the user, but it may show up in places, much like how URLs
appear in the address bar of a browser.  The user doesnt really need to
know what it is.  Just that it works.

Tied to may URL is my name (used for personalizing apps), my email address
(which could be used as a short hand to log in), my crypto addresses (used
to send crypto coins), my wallets (which are like ledgers and give you
instructions on how to send credits), my keys (used for PKI and login) and
pretty much any other info I want.

Lets say you want to send me some crypto coins, you send to my email
address, it does a reverse lookup on my http url and finds my crypto
addresses.

Lets say you want to send me some webcredits, you similarly get my wallets,
then if you have a positive balance, it will give you an API endpoint or
inboxl that you can send credits to.  My agent will pick up the payment and
make the transfer.

Same could apply sending money from phone to phone, via irc or internet
chat etc. lots of other use cases present themselves.

This is how the web / linked data was designed to work, it gives you not
just human readable flows, but machine readable flows so that simple steps
such as payments can be performed by machines / agents.  Leading to complex
and innovative use cases.


>
> Thanks,
> david
>