Re: Executive Summary of Web Payments work

On 3/11/15 9:15 PM, Manu Sporny wrote:
> It's not done yet, but the Web Payments IG has been working on an
> executive summary of an "ideal outcome" wrt. the W3C Web Payments work.
> There's enough there that it's worth a read:
>
> https://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/wiki/ExecSummary

> Proposed but not agreed yet
>
>     Person-to-person
>            A system should enable simple, small payments between two
>            individuals,

Surprising to me that this is not agreed in the Web Payments IG. In my 
mind, it was a primary goal of a revamped world payment system.

But, if I may speculate a bit, perhaps not so surprising...because the 
accepted goals listed before it rely on there being 'merchants' and 
'consumers' (or, 'users' as the Executive Summary appears to refer to 
them, euphemistically) as separate classes of human being.

Having payments easy, without middlepersons, between any human beings, 
without such classes, might wreak havoc (or at least make big changes) 
in the social order. Are we ready for that?

I think I'm willing to risk it personally, but perhaps the 
corporations that will benefit from the W3C process (and who fund it) 
aren't willing to.

Further...I'm thinking that having the two classes defined ('Merchant' 
and 'User/Consumer') relies on several bureaucracies that are taken 
for granted today:
      a) Corporations to organize, monopolize, and/or oligopolize most 
services and products, including digital ones;
      b) Financial institutions to skim percentages off the movement 
of money;
      c) Governments to skim percentages from everything, and to watch 
that people are obeying laws.

I'm not saying that these bureaucracies are bad things. Some subset of 
each category seems highly desirable. But IMO *some* subset of each of 
a), b), and c) are probably bad, or at least redundant, and therefore 
bad in an efficiency sense. For example, with computers and the 
Internet, single human beings could technically manage vast amounts of 
digital products by themselves  -- except for the financial aspects 
(so far). So it's at least *possible* that the easy movement of 
person-to-person money via the Internet would hone the whole 
interlocked system of a), b), and c) down a bit; might allow an 
efficiency shakedown in all three categories.

Final speculation -- in for a penny, in for a pound ;-)  -- I suspect 
it's going to happen anyway; if the Web Payments IG doesn't want to 
touch it, then Ripple/Bitcoin/whatever +Mobile Payments will do it, 
and it will have a huge effect, in all likelihood, and subvert some of 
the WP IG standards work (if they ignore it).

My... .00006 BTC?...  ;-)

Steven Rowat

Received on Thursday, 12 March 2015 17:48:46 UTC