Re: modeling wallets

On 17 May 2015 at 03:53, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> On 05/16/2015 09:22 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> > <Alice> <com:account> <Alice:#account1> <Alice:#account1>
> > <com:currency> "USD". <Alice:#account1> <rdfs:label> "Party Money".
> > <Alice:#account1> <com:ledger> <Alice:#ledger1>
> >
> > I'd been using DCT : description for the "Party Money" part, I can
> > switch to RDFS label, that looks better.
>
> IIRC, we chose rdfs:label because it was more "low level" than
> dct:description in that it was a part of the core RDF stack. Either
> should work just fine, but it would be nice to know why dct:description
> essentially duplicates the RDFS term.
>
> > I've been thinking quite a bit about ledgers based on accounts and
> > ledgers based on users.  My current conclusion is that I'd like to
> > try both.
>
> We used com:account primarily because we needed to group other things w/
> the abstraction (name, currency, etc.). Not all accounts have ledgers,
> so that also influenced our decision to use 'account'.
>

Yes, I love that feature.


>
> > The issue with user based ledgers is that they need a default
> > currency, so I've selected bitcoin for that.
>
> I don't think you need a default, do you? You can just assign a currency
> to the inbox?
>

If you have:

<#Alice> comm : amount  "10" .
<#Bob> comm : amount  "15" .

In some document, how do you add a currency?

I thought about

<#Alice> com : amount  "10"^^<currency> .

ie currency as a type, but im not too familiar with what the implications
of that are.

It was unclear to me how to keep the structure simple (triples) and include
a currency without a default.

Adding more granularity allows you to be more expressive, but it comes at
the cost of simplicity, graph traversal complexity and introduction of new
account ids or bnodes.  So I see pros and cons here.


>
> > My idea for a wallet so far is that it points to an API which allows
> > the user to be input as a query string.  Then it has an inbox where
> > there user can send transactions based on their user name.  One inbox
> > per user.
>
> The PaySwarm API abstraction level is a bit more low level - one API per
> ledger/account. So, restructuring the previous example:
>
> <Alice> <com:account> <Alice:/account1>
> <Alice:/account1> <com:currency> "USD".
> <Alice:/account1> <rdfs:label> "Party Money".
> <Alice:/account1> <com:ledger> <Alice:/account1/ledger>
> <Alice:/account1/ledger> <com:api> <https://w3id.org/apis/ledger/v1> .
>

That is interesting.  I'll bear this in mind as I flesh out my
implementation.  I could reuse this I think.

>
> > One thing that seems to be slightly different is that I would
> > consider a wallet to be a container of many accounts/users, but can
> > be used with one account/user.
> >
> > <Alice> <cc:wallet> <Alice:#wallet> <Alice:#wallet> a cc:Wallet
> > <Alice:#wallet> <rdfs:label> "Main wallet at ACME inc".
> > <Alice:#wallet> <cc:api> <http://acme.com/api/v1>. <Alice:#wallet>
> > <cc:inbox> <https://acme.com/etc/wallet/>.
>
> Yeah, that's another way to model it. I think we chose to say an account
> can:
>
> 1) have multiple entities that have access to it
> 2) have N ledgers, but most likely it'll be 1 for most transactional
>    mechanisms
>
> We avoided the whole "wallet" modeling approach because it seemed more
> like a "UI" thing than a fundamental modeling thing. For example, a UI
> could use the concept of a wallet to group multiple accounts together,
> but that would have no functional changes on how one would access
> accounts and ledgers.
>

Also a great idea, you've given me.  I might have my UI holding many
wallets, and notifying when new stuff comes in.  Might be interesting to
make that into a web component, so it can be reused by any HTML page.


>
> > The fields above are still very experimental, and I'd be happy to
> > change them.  Just trying to get a prototype working and reusing some
> > common patterns.
>
> +1 - let us know how it goes. Interested to hear how the "user based
> ledger" concept pans out.
>

Thanks, will let you know!


>
> -- 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/
>
>