Re: Web Payments and voucher URIs

On Tue, 20 Aug 2019 at 15:12, Adrian Hope-Bailie <adrian@hopebailie.com>
wrote:

> Hey Melvin,
> Have a looked at paymentpointers.org?
> The voucher could be $vouchersforyou.com/87t88yef76df7td7wtde7twde which
> translates to https://vouchersforyou.com/87t88yef76df7td7wtde7twde and is
> de-referenceable.
>

Thinking more about payment pointers I think we can go one better than
requiring BOTH the voucher AND the domain.

Im thinking of the use case of a lunch voucher that is accepted in many
restaurants (this may not be a great analogy)

What if you were to have a key pair.  The private key is used to redeem the
voucher.  The public key is used to look up where the server or servers are
which respect that voucher.  This could be stored on a set of well known
hosts, or ipfs, or use a bootstrap and gossip type protocol, or even stored
out of band.  You then can locate where to spend something just from the
number on the voucher.

Simplest implementation of this would be to have a site that lets you PUT
public key + host pairs, when a voucher is created, and you should DELETE
them when they are spent or expired, to save space.

Thus, you could simply send someone a link urn:voucher:abcdef...  and they
just click on the link and they are taken to a way to redeem it, spend it,
send it on etc.

This does not preclude the case where you send both pieces of information,
but just provides another work flow with fewer moving parts.

I could write this up in the spec.  A natural thing to use would be bitcoin
key pairs, since they are widely deployed, but in fact any hash or trap
door function, i think would work.


> Adrian
>
> On Tue, 20 Aug 2019 at 11:43, Sam Mbale <smbale@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> This might off topic, but I thought about what Michiel highlighted:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *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.  *
>>
>>
>> This could be a practical example
>> New Age of Digital Asset Exchanges - Japan's Largest Gift Card Exchange
>> Pioneers Blockchain Expansion
>> <http://wire.mpelembe.net/pr-newswire-news-releases/?rkey=20190820EN43448&filter=9768>
>>
>> Tom Kanazawa, the chairman of Amaten said: *"The current system and
>> technology used for gift card is completely obsolete and dates all the way
>> back to the mid 90s. It has never evolved to match today's digital world.
>> It still suffers from basic fundamental shortcomings and is very
>> inconvenient. I believe that the gift card industry can be a perfect use
>> case for blockchain. The two are a completely natural fit.**We have
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>>
>> All the best
>> Sam
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 at 07:39, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> 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?
>>>>
>>>