Re: On Interoperability

On 01/12/2012 02:06 PM, Guillaume Lebleu wrote:
> What the payment space needs is a way to authorize and clear in
> *real-time* the transfer of liability, via a chain of debit/credit on
> the balance sheet of various nodes (credit intermediaries), whether
> official banks or not. The challenge is to be able to discover nodes
> that can participate in this chain based on the preferences of the
> parties to the transaction, and then be able to commit that chain of
> transactions.

Could you explain a bit more Guillaume? I'm pretty sure we already do
this in PaySwarm (discovery of nodes and transfer of liability).

Discoverability because every IRI used in the PaySwarm protocol can be
dereferenced and machine-readable information can be extracted from it.
All IRIs are human- and machine-readable (HTML for the human part, RDFa
for the machine-readable part). That is how we do discovery.

Transfer of liability is explained in the link to the archive at the end
of this message.

> The interesting thing is that every transaction in this chain is a
> transaction on a credit intermediary's balance sheet, from one
> account of an issuer of assets to another account at the same issuer,
> so OpenTransact fits really well this model.

I disagree. While that may be the intent for OpenTransact, it is not
technically implementable in an interoperable fashion, based on the text
in the current specification. It has also been asserted that specifying
this as a part of the Core specification is out of scope. Have you read
this yet, Guillaume?

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2012Jan/0025.html

It explains why I do not think OpenTransact systems are interoperable.
If you could explain where I go wrong, I'd appreciate it.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm vs. OpenTransact Shootout
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/

Received on Friday, 13 January 2012 01:44:06 UTC