Re: On Interoperability

On 12 January 2012 19:37, Pelle Braendgaard <pelle@stakeventures.com> wrote:
> OpenTransact is all about interoperability. That is why it was created. I
> have been quite perplexed to be honest where this comes from.
>
> It is not just library interoperability.
>
> It is trusting that my application can work with many different providers.
>
> It is allowing people to create new interesting derivative open transact
> services on top of existing services.
>
> It is also about letting me bring my transactions with me and maintain them
> in a separate app.
>
> However as I understand it the very narrow definition of Interoperability
> that Manu believes we don't support is:
>
> I want to pay someone from my PayPal account and having it show up in my
> Moms Dwolla account.
>
> http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/#interoperability
>
> Just like when you in a bank can send money from one bank to another.
>
> Before I start going through the issues here. I would like to ask where
> PaySwarm specifically specifies how to move money from one payment provider
> to another? I can not find it in the spec.
>
> What we realize though is that there are many different ways payment
> services can interoperate.
>
> This is not as simple as defining a protocol. There are many different
> issues here.
>
> Like how do I as PayPal move money to Dwolla? That is not an API issue.
>
> Traditionally in the US you can abstract that away to banks via the ACH
> network and SWIFT internationally.
>
> PayPal and Dwolla both use ACH to move money between peoples bank accounts.
>
> The way money is moved in banking has traditionally been through banks
> maintaining "nostro" accounts within each other.
>
> So if I have an account with CitiBank and want to send $20 to someone in
> Wells Fargo. Citi would credit Well's Fargos nostro account $20 and tell
> them to send it to their customers account. Chase would charge Citibanks
> nostro account $20 and move that into their customers account.
>
> Every now and then (in the old days) you would have to physically move money
> or gold to maintain good nostro account levels.
>
> This was later modernized by having central banks deal with such movements
> in a centralized ledger, so individual banks didn't have to have connections
> with everyone.
>
> In a web payment 1.0 world PayPal and Dwolla use ACH to abstract away all of
> that.
>
> In a web payment 2.0 world without ACH things are different. We want to move
> money between two of possibly thousands of payment providers, we need either
> a distributed graph of connected payment providers each with "nostro"
> accounts with each other or a few central players.
>
> I like the distributed graph model myself. The most important proposal in
> this space is Ryan Fuggers Ripple project http://ripple-project.org/
>
> There is actually an OpenTransact implementation of it called Rivulet here:
>
> https://github.com/jplewicke/rivulet
>
> These are currently all based on a central graph database. But the ideas
> could definitely be implemented in a distributed way using OpenTransact.

Just a question about this (hopefully related to interoperability).

Why use a central graph database when the Web is already a highly
scalable distributed graph database, with namespaces?

>
> The point of all of this is interoperability can mean a lot of things. Also
> that sending money from one institution to another is not quite as simple as
> it is made out.
>
> P
>
>
> --
> http://picomoney.com - Like money, just smaller
> http://stakeventures.com - My blog about startups and agile banking

Received on Friday, 13 January 2012 02:47:10 UTC