Re: Payments as a CSV

On 22 September 2012 08:30, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 9:36 PM, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:
> > creation of the UIFA as a transferrable item good
> > for a best-efforts repayment by Alice
>
> the premise of OpenTabs is to not ever transfer a debt to third
> person, but yeah, i'm aware that most other alternative money systems
> i've heard of do do that, so the formats we propose in this CG should
> probably support it.
>

This is called clearing.  Many argue it's one of the killer features of
money.  Note that you can model clearing in a certain way, when parties
trust each other.

Alice owes Bob 10 euros.

Bob wishes to pay Carol 5 euros.

With permission from both parties he can reduce his debt from Alice by 5
and Alice can pay Carol 5.  So this transfer can be modeled in terms of 2
new IOUs.

In practice it's advantageous to leverage the legal framework in a country
to set up contracts and a degree of enforcement when trust is not 100%


>
> is it good enough to say that the currency on debts (i.e., both on
> credit transactions and on credit balances between parties) can be a
> URI?
>

On the web anything of significance should be a URI.  So for example you
can have

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Euro

Historically finance has used the 3 letter ISO such as EUR and payswarm
supports that

But you can model just about anything with a URI including sophisticated
financial products such as baskets, futures, options, currency mints.  It's
basically infinitely extensible.