Re: Introductions

On 08/19/2011 04:04 PM, Pelle Braendgaard wrote:
> My name is Pelle Braendgaard I have been involved with payments,
> authentication standards, signatures etc since the late 90s. I am
> currently working on a startup http://picomoney.com which is a platform
> for creating tradable electronic assets.

Hi Pelle,

Glad to see you on this list as we're fans of the work you're doing with 
OpenTransact and PicoMoney. Moreover, you have consistently been an 
excellent thinker and blogger about the future of value, currencies, 
banking and payments on the Web. I think there is a great deal of 
similarities, both philosophical and technical between OpenTransact and 
PaySwarm - so I think there is plenty of work that can be merged between 
the two.

> I have been working with a growing community over the last year or two
> on pushing a really simple standard for payments (or more generically
> asset transfers) over http and oauth.
>
> Our work is at http://opentransact.org . There are several examples on
> our github project http://github.com/opentransact
>
> The goals behind open transact are exactly the same as those outlined at
> payswarm. From a technical point of view we do take a slightly lower
> level over the the current payswarm work.

There are a number of conceptual and technical similarities between 
PaySwarm and OpenTransact (which is a good thing, imho):

  * Asset-based view of "sellable" items
  * Support for simple transfers, website purchases, subscriptions and
    payment sessions
  * HTTP and REST-based Web Services are at the core - IRIs identify
    things.
  * OAuth-based (but I think we're moving away from this, more on that
                 later).

There are also differences:

PaySwarm:
  * Uses Linked Data concepts quite heavily.
  * Lists assets in a secure and decentralized manner.
  * Heavily utilizes digital signatures for authenticity.
  * Utilizes digital contracts as the basic transactional element.
  * Reduces technical implementation complexity for buyers and
    sellers in the marketplace.

The current OAuth-based PaySwarm process is outlined here:

http://payswarm.com/slides/website-payswarm/

However, we're thinking of moving away from OAuth as it complicated the 
transaction process more than necessary. We've found that digital 
signatures on JSON objects are going to be simpler for websites to 
implement (with the proper libraries, of course).

There is also a demo of PaySwarm here:

http://payswarm.com/wiki/WordPress_Recipes_Demo

Pelle, do you have a demo link for OpenTransact? I've browsed around a 
bit on the site, both today and in the past, and I can't find a demo 
that is currently working. The NuBux demo crashes on me, but I thought I 
had used it before and it worked.

In any case - very excited that you're on this mailing list and I look 
forward to figuring out how we can pick the best concepts from 
OpenTransact and PaySwarm and move forward toward a universal Web 
Payments solution.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Uber Comparison of RDFa, Microformats and Microdata
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/uber-comparison-rdfa-md-uf/

Received on Saturday, 20 August 2011 15:16:16 UTC