Re: The difference between PaySwarm and OpenTransact

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Pelle Braendgaard
<pelle@stakeventures.com> wrote:
> So it is not a centralized protocol and never was. It is just for each
> unique asset there is a central transaction processor.

and here we're talking past e/o about what "centralized" means. E-mail
is a great example of something that is in the large decentralized but
in the small centralized. the w3.org listserv is the central point for
posting to the lists there, so it might be entirely correct to say
"w3.org mailing lists are centralized."


There could be 1000s
> of different USD payment providers each one providing a USD based asset.
> These could talk to each other as has been discussed in other threads.

And there are, and they do! (just not using the internet. Well, maybe
until recently. I have no idea if ACH uses the internet or not, except
of course through intermediary liaisons.)

> OpenTransact protocol. They are certainly not out of scope of our
> discussion. But we can not standardize something yet when there are 100s of
> different ways of transporting the money.

Drawing a scope line for the discussion might be in order. Having
introduced the "liaison" concept and term, I'd like to propose that
the discussion be limited to automated book-entry accounting systems.
That makes "and then you have to drive your Ford over there and pick
up the gold bars" off-topic. Also, cryptographic bearer instruments
become off-topic, except as a supportable use case: some entity
willing to take on the risk of their bearer protocol getting cracked
may liaise an asset.


> I would argue just by virtue of our focus on delegation, OpenTransact is
> considerably more open, secure and interoperable than a system where you
> have to share your private key.

what? someone proposed a PKI system involving sharing of private keys?
Has anyone told http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann so he can
laugh?



>> I disagree. It is not about an open ecosystem, but rather a closed one
>> where everyone has to get an account with each payment provider -- or they
>> can't do business with each other.

the use of openID for identity on OT means your account has the same
identity at all participating locations. Presuming of course that
particpating locations autovivify account records on validation of
openIDs. They do, right?



> As I explained above this is a huge misunderstanding and probably my fault
> for not explaining it correctly. This is not about Silos. It's about opening
> up silos and creating commerce and finance networks on the web.

But... where's the business model? With a silo, you can sell access to it.


> Bulk payment is an obvious important scaling issue we have not dealt with. A
> bulk extension on top of or included in OpenTransact Core, but using the
> exact same semantics is absolutely a good idea and does not conflict at all
> with the basic concepts or semantics of OpenTransact.

setting up an identity that periodically disburses its entire
aggregated receivable to a list based on some ratio, is entirely
tractable with donor-gives-recipient-amount-of-currency semantics.
There's no reason to complicate things at the protocol level (since
network bandwidth is no longer expensive), and various reasons against
it (hard to get right, for instance, as in DJB's justifications for
why EZMLM doesn't aggregate deliveries to multiple recipients at the
same domain  http://cr.yp.to/ezmlm.html )


>
> I beg to differ. It's SOAP vs Rest
>

I didn't get that either.



> Hopefully in tomorrows call we can be more civil and and talk openly about
> what we can do to work together on this.

I intend to attempt to attend the teleconference tomorrow; I will try
to stay out of the way.

Received on Friday, 13 January 2012 00:30:59 UTC