Re: Legacy systems vs blockchains - what is the spec impact?

Daniel,

I'm sure this is a focus of several people here, but its also something I'm
working on with some others outside this list (who work directly in the
central banking field).

In the case of the small "other community" of people I'm examining this
with, we've been discussing how to de-constructed the payment event into
its generic elements abstracted from any particular medium of exchange or
unit of account.  The rationale is that such a simple and truly generic
description ought to provide a useful structure upon which to anchor a
specifications suited to any type payment. This is a non-trivial conceptual
effort, drawing back into the history of monetary thought, but also
following very current literature on "immediate funds transfer" (eg
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227437933_Emergence_of_immediate_funds_transfer_as_a_general-purpose_means_of_payment/file/60b7d52b376a44949c.pdf
).

We plan to use our generic structure as the basis for some plug-in
extensions to an existing agent-based international economic model (100%
free/libre/open). We think this model should then be useful towards testing
the economic impacts of different trends in payment behaviors (i.e. choices
in payment attributes) amongst firms and household both individually and in
the context of networked supply chains.

But our hope is that this payments design experimentation environment will
be useful for modeling many sorts of scenarios and questions related
payment options, trends and objectives -- or to use your phrase: "if for a
moment you imagine a world where payments happened..." with given set of
assumptions and parameters.

I've been trying to get the de-constructed payment event section ready
before TPAC -- I'll try to post that later today.

Joseph Potvin, M.Phil. MCPM
Doctoral Candidate, Project Management
Université du Québec

Chair, OSI Management Education Working Group

Coordinator, The FLOW Syllabus
http://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Projects/flow-syllabus

The Open Source Initiative

Operations Manager | Gestionnaire des opérations
The Opman Company | La compagnie Opman
jpotvin@opman.ca
Mobile: 819-593-5983



On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Daniel.Buchner <Daniel.Buchner@target.com>
wrote:

>  Hello Web Pay-ers,
>
> My first question for the group after last reviewing these specs over a
> year ago: How much are they crafted around traditional payment systems vs
> new tech like blockchains? More specifically, if for a moment you imagine a
> world where payments happened *primarily *over a shared blockchain, would
> significant portions of these specs be irrelevant without the encumbrance
> of legacy payment systems?
>
> - Daniel
>



-- 
Joseph Potvin
Operations Manager | Gestionnaire des opérations
The Opman Company | La compagnie Opman
jpotvin@opman.ca
Mobile: 819-593-5983