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

On 10/23/2014 01:22 AM, Eric Martindale wrote:
> Eric Martindale with BitPay here.

Hey Eric, welcome to the Web Payments Community Group. I'm excited to
see you engage the group because it's been particularly difficult to get
the larger Bitcoin organizations involved in this work. For example,
we've been able to engage the US Federal Reserve, NACS, Yandex, and
Bloomberg pretty successfully, but have a hard time getting even small
players in the Bitcoin space involved. So, it's great to have an A
player like BitPay participating in the conversation.

> *Proof of Identity* is one major focus point that we feel is 
> under-represented in the WebPayments Group, especially in regards to 
> a transition from the legacy financial infrastructure to a 
> post-blockchain infrastructure with no single points of failure 
> (SPOF).

It may feel under-represented because we spun that work out into the
Credentials Community Group a while ago:

https://www.w3.org/community/credentials/charter/

Most of that discussion is happening on a separate mailing list:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/

and on separate telecons:

http://opencreds.org/minutes/

I'm curious, what do you mean by "a post-blockchain infrastructure"?

> Currently, this is addressed in the WebPayments group through the
> use of centralized oracles, or Identity Providers 
> <https://web-payments.org/specs/source/identity-credentials/#dfn-identity_provider>.

Why do you think those systems are centralized?

The whole point is to enable anyone to choose their own identity
provider, not be locked in, and run an identity provider of their own if
they want to. More below...

> This will lead to a secondary centralized system not unlike the 
> current CA infrastructure.

I hope not, as that's exactly the sort of thing we're trying to avoid.
Have you had a chance to read through this background material yet?

http://manu.sporny.org/2014/credential-based-login/

https://manu.sporny.org/2014/identity-credentials/

> Ideally, this should be replaced with a blockchain-based identity 
> solution, such as Namecoin, or another more sophisticated platform, 
> perhaps utilizing recent innovations using sidechain pegging 
> <http://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf>.

Out of curiosity, do you have a proposal on how such a system would
work? For example, how does one read and write credentials to the
system? How does it integrate with the Web? How do you deal with people
that lose their private keys? etc.

We really need more proposals in this space, and if there is one that
uses blockchain technology and integrates cleanly with the Web, we'd
probably be very interested in using it as the "decentralized storage
network" for this information.

> Additionally, over-representation of the legacy “pull”-based 
> financial infrastructure is narrowing focus around centralized 
> providers 
> <https://web-payments.org/specs/source/vocabs/creditcard.html> rather
> than decentralized networks.  BitPay would like to see additional
> efforts made to incorporate “push”-based financial mechanisms such as
> Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

We're almost entirely focused on push-based solutions in the Web
Payments CG. Just because the technology we work on here supports paying
via the legacy financial system doesn't mean we don't also support
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

So, I think there is a bit of miscommunication here. Responses to the
questions I asked above and further thoughts from your perspective will
hopefully help us clear up some of those misconceptions.

Again, welcome to the group - looking forward to hearing more from you. :)

-- manu

-- 
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 Friday, 24 October 2014 04:12:55 UTC