- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 15:07:41 -0400
- To: public-webpayments@w3.org
On 06/14/2014 06:43 AM, Ricardo Varela wrote: > "To be honest, I arrived not with a spec or even a goal in mind, but > rather just some observations about our online payments, that 1) > when I pay online there's always somebody between me and the person > I'm trying to pay, 2) the transaction often does not happen > immediately, there is often some waiting period and 3) Quite often > one or both of the participants must pay a transaction fee." "Then I > noticed that these characteristics all disappear when I pay cash. > It's 1) DIRECT, 2) IMMEDIATE & 3) FREE. Incidentally, there is at > least one other observation, 4) I get my change in cash" > > I think that analogy is actually a bit misguided. There is a third > party involved in EVERY transaction where there is no direct trust > between you (the person paying) and the merchant (the person > receiving). +1 Just wanted to underscore this important point by Ricardo, as the whole "We're going to create a payment system with no fees!" rhetoric is misguided in general. Dave L., more specifically to your point, cash is not free. It has tremendous fees associated with it; namely, the cost of inefficiency, and a standing police, military, and legal system to enforce transactions. Those fees tend to be hidden from you, but they're there and they're non-trivial. To put a figure on it, cash costs the average American family $1,739/year[1]. Even direct barter has fees associated with it (the cost of transporting the bartered items to/from the buyer/seller). The second you get into an indirect barter situation, you're going to add fees due to the trust relationship that's required. Either 1) you already have the necessary relationships, and thus the fees are paid in the time it took you to build and maintain your network or relationships, or 2) you need to pay someone (fees) to broker the deal. Just because we can get great efficiencies via the Web/Internet doesn't mean that we can drive the cost/fees of a payment system to 0. We reduce the costs by an order of magnitude or more, but it would violate information theory to say that we can build a payment system where one could transact for "free". That said, you probably didn't mean "free". You probably meant that we can gain great efficiencies via automation (technology), using a global, efficient communication network (the Internet), and removing as many intermediaries as possible (peer-to-peer). I don't think many people on this list would disagree with you on that point as it's why most of us are involved in this group. :) -- manu [1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101103705 -- Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny) Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/
Received on Sunday, 15 June 2014 19:08:10 UTC