Re: Web Payments and voucher URIs

Hi Melvin,

Great topic! I like how the scheme is very generic, but maybe at the same
time that's a downside, because how would you dereference
'urn:voucher:12345abcd ...'? Maybe start by base64-decoding it? But what
would you see then, and how would that refer to a party who is willing to
"cash" the voucher? There could be some indication of some account
identifier at some ledger, but for that, you would need some more mechanics
than just the opaque URI scheme. An interesting approach to that problem is
Interledger addresses, for instance.

I would say there are generally two types of vouchers, relational (where
the issuer has some social connection to the redeemer) and anonymous (where
the voucher has a more universal value, against some anonymous "bubble").
If you're interested in peer-to-peer vouchers rather than anonymous ones,
then may I take this opportunity to plug the Network Money mailing list I
started last year, particularly this post in which I concluded that maybe
peer-to-peer money is in the end not really what people want:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/network-money/Z2zAyX1R8Xo.

Cheers,
Michiel.

On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 5:02 PM Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I have written a payment server that can use arbitrarily many
> authentication methods on the web.
>
> The outcome of that authentication is to return a verified URI.  You could
> think of it as a super set of WebID, DID, user addresses and so on.
>
> One thing I'd like to do is have a voucher system.  So the idea with a
> voucher is that it has a special code, say you email it to someone, or have
> a scratch card or something.
>
> Then when that code is shown the back end is able to let the user spend
> whatever balance it is for.  So it's a long the lines of a voucher, a
> shared secret or a one time password.
>
> This may be similar to a bearer token, im not sure, as Im not so familiar
> with those.
>
> My question in all this is, given that I need a URI that is linked to the
> voucher.  Is there something existing I can use.  Or, is there some
> sensible standard we can start experimenting with.
>
> The idea I had was to use the URI
>
> *urn:voucher:12345abcd ...*
>
> And if that appears in the request you know. the user can spend the
> voucher, and that allows me to build an app.
>
> Any thoughts, ideas or previous work that can be reused here?
>