Re: Thoughts on Discovery

I think as a prototype of an alternative Discovery flow it would even be ok
to just show the resolution flow.

What are the steps leading up to returning the URI? That's what you'd want
to demonstrate.

If you do want to fork our code, the relevant section would be here:

https://github.com/interledger/five-bells-wallet/blob/master/api/src/controllers/webfinger.js

Note that running a wallet service requires a few steps at the moment: You
need to have a ledger where you're the admin, so generally that means
setting up a ledger first, then setting up a wallet. If you wanted to show
interledger payments, you'd also need to set up a connector to some other
ledger. In the future, we'll hopefully streamline a lot of this, but that's
beyond the scope of this email.


On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 3:58 AM, Adrian Hope-Bailie <adrian@hopebailie.com>
wrote:

> There have been some good discussions around the correct technology for
> the discovery of a receiving account (ledger).
>
> The current proposal is to to use WebFinger (
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7033) which is the basis for discovery in
> a variety of web based protocols such as OpenID Connect.
>
> There has been a proposal to use JSON-LD however it is unclear at this
> stage how this would be done as JSON-LD is not a protocol, it is a data
> format for linked data.
>
> There have also been suggestions to explore other existing lower level
> discovery protocols such as DDDS based on DNS.
>
> I've been having this debate for about 10 years in various groups related
> to payments, identity and other more obscure use cases. The reality is that
> there is no one discovery protocol appropriate for all use cases.
>
> In an ideal world there would be an entirely decentralised registry
> (noting that DNS is not) that could be used as the primary source of truth
> for resolving a human readable identifier into something that can be used
> by a machine to accomplish some specific goal.
>
> I don't believe it's the goal of this group to solve this problem but if
> we feel the current proposal of Webfinger is inappropriate for resolving an
> account@ledger identifer into a ledger address then let's find a a better
> alternative.
>
> But, before we get into a religious debate about the choice of technology
> I'd suggest we agree on what the requirements and design goals are for this
> discovery protocol.
>
> This discovery protocol is intended to be simple and form part of a basic
> application layer payments protocol we're developing called OWPS which also
> has a stated design goal of being simple and addressing only a select set
> of use cases.
>
> As I have stated in a separate thread, nothing prevents us from taking the
> plunge and trying to develop a far richer application layer protocol that
> incorporates more complex systems of discovery.
>
> Finally, if there are alternative proposals to WebFinger please let's see
> them in action. All of the Interledger code is being developed in the open
> so it should be possible to fork the project you're interested in and
> implementing an alternative proposal for everyone to review.
>
>