Re: Mozilla and navigator.mozPay() for Firefox OS

On 01/19/2013 04:03 PM, Kumar McMillan wrote:
> Hi all, I am new to the list so please bear with me as I check out 
> the archives and catch up with PaySwarm, etc.

Welcome to the Web Payments list Kumar. :)

We've been keeping track of the Mozilla Web Payment API progress. I'm a
big fan of the concept. We've been meaning to contact you and the rest
of the folks working on it, so thanks for reaching out!

> A critical part of this effort is making payments secure and easy on 
> the mobile web.

One of our goals as well - many of the goals between the two projects
are aligned, which is great to see.

> A user will already be on the phone so why not charge a payment to 
> their bill?

It's a good option and makes sense when you're on a phone. However, we
want to give folks more options than that. Centralizing payments at a
mobile operator could lead to some fairly negative effects if payments
through this mechanism becomes standard. That is, it would effectively
create a monopoly among a small handful of carriers, which would drive
transaction prices up.

So, in addition to being able to perform the purchase via the carrier,
we want to provide many other options for payment as well. Strong
competition helps keep fees and price gouging down.

> This is navigator.mozPay() which you can read about in 
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment and also in 
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPaymentProvider The latter 
> describes the server side of which Mozilla will ship an 
> implementation, currently in progress at 
> https://github.com/mozilla/webpay

I knew about the client-side, but didn't know about the server-side of
things. Very interesting, will dive into it in the coming weeks.

> Making the payment API fully decentralized was *very hard*.

Yeah. :P

> In the future, Mozilla is very interested in pursuing a
> decentralized payment model that works securely for all parties on
> the web and is quick and painless for users.

... and we're very interested in working with Mozilla to make this
happen. I've been in contact with Ben Adida, who is working on the
Persona stuff - we've had a few exchanges on the identity mechanism that
would underlie a decentralized identification mechanism that could be
extended to support payments. The PaySwarm stuff has an extensible
identity mechanism, we're trying to see if we can integrate that with
Persona so that you can login with Persona (who then can transmit your
payment provider to the merchant) and then complete the transaction
using PaySwarm. There's a great deal of potential here... would love to
discuss it in more depth with you as the months go on.

> Right now, anyone can participate as a payment provider on Firefox OS
> but they'd have to roll their own (like Stripe, PayPal, etc). It is
> in our interest to level the playing field for payments so that 
> anyone on the web can participate in sending and receiving money for
>  digital goods without rolling their own system.

We'd be interested in integrating via the first commercial PaySwarm
Authority, which should be launching in the coming weeks. It all depends
on how difficult it is to integrate the server component into our
software. I'll chat with you about this off-line.

Welcome to the list, Kumar - great to have you here! :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Aaron Swartz, PaySwarm, and Academic Journals
http://manu.sporny.org/2013/payswarm-journals/

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 02:44:06 UTC