I have always been a fan of how Tigerbeetle abstracts away time so you can simulate ticks for testing purposes. Not applicable to all systems but really powerful for their use case.
On the contrary I think both products are excellent.
The issue I have is that we've taken 20 years to find a better alternative than raw card data in Web forms and as a result we're gonna be stuck with a choice of only those 2 wallets when we could have a had wallets as diverse as websites if we'd been able to work together on a solution that was appropriate to the Web platform.
Can you share more of that vision? As a well-off US consumer, things are fine. It takes me seconds to pay in person. It takes seconds to pay online using either of the wallets or via almost-direct entry with 1Password.
I get that I/we have ceded control of funds flows to card networks like Visa and processors like Stripe. Even if I didn’t work for Stripe, I would be okay with this as a merchant due to the convenience.
What am I missing? What do you envision is better for consumers and/or merchants?
I think you miss the point that card payments should never have evolved to still require us to type sensitive data into a web form at all.
Also, don't forget that 2FA etc are not ubiquitous, especially not in the US.
As I implied, PCI DSS is lipstick on a pig. We could have done much better in the last 20 years. Now Apple and Google are doing it for us and we won't have any choice but to get further locked into their walled gardens.
No I get and agree to that point, but the article also literally says the line I quoted above! Those are not mutually exclusive.
Apple and Google pay I feel like will somehow get stuck in the USA, I'm from Spain and I can def not see how, seeing how convenient payments are over there, they will get any meaningful penetration. It's funny because every year that I've come back to Spain (now I live in Japan) there's been a totally different but more convenient way of payments there. I need to write about it some day. Like, I'm the last person who expected payment methods would have a 1-year turnaround in the "old school" country of Spain! But somehow it happened, and that while not locking foreigners out (which is common e.g. in Japan, where you have all these "strange" payment methods that are inscrutable for tourists).
It's actually about what is supported natively in Web browsers and what the vendors of those browsers have done to make it better.
Sadly you are correct that the mentality of the browser vendors is VERY card (and US) centric so accommodations for other payment methods get very little attention.
This is not a fault of the working group participants who have tried to push for everything from iDEAL to crypto but in the end it's pretty clear we're heading for a wallet-dominated world and we all know who those wallets will come from unless we push back.
This is pretty much the exact distinction between the US attitude to cards and the rest of the world. In the US, the ability to dispute a card tx is just part of life.
Everywhere else the banks have forced poor UX onto merchants in the name of shifting liability and improved security.
This is why the US rolled out chip cards with a signature while everyone else has been using chip and PIN for years.
We're working to make the Web Monetization API a standard that browsers can adopt natively: https://webmonetization.org
The extension helps us bootstrap the ecosystem but a native integration is far superior. Check out Puma browser for an example of the integrated experience for mobile.
This was a straight donation. A thriving Web ecosystem of independent developers and creators building and hosting their own content is what gets us out of bed in the morning.
Credit to Ali Spivak who kicked this all off and helped us realise what a crucial role good platform documentation plays and how important it is to fund good knowledgeable writers.
That's where the idea started but that means the user has to be able to send Bitcoin. The purpose of Interledger is to abstract away that issue which is why Web Monetization is built on Interledger.
You don't have to sign up with Coil to earn. There are other wallets that are on the Interledger network such as Uphold and Gatehub that can give you a payment pointer to put into your site's HTML. If you want your earnings to be converted to BTC that's possible I think.
I understand that the person paying probably needs an account somewhere, so that payments can be batched together to reduce transaction fees.
However, there's no reason for me to have an account anywhere in order to receive bitcoin. All I need is a bitcoin address.
I don't want to sign up with Coil, Interledger, Uphold, Gatehub, or any other random third party, in order to receive bitcoin. And there is zero reason why I would have to.
Except that Interledger is not a "random third party", it's a protocol: https://interledger.org/
So that you can make payments to someone else regardless of whether they want to use Bitcoin or not.
I believe Interledger is the right level of abstraction for this, in the same way that you wouldn't want your email server to have to know or code against the lower protocols, e.g. Ethernet or WiFi, but only IP, TCP and SMTP. This way your email server can EHLO any email server, regardless of the network topology or underlying protocols.
Ok, so my bitcoin address is "bitcoin:1PQLtWnjUi1itHLG6QCQeHM3Nxua8pRsq1". What tag do I put in my HTML in order to receive payment from this system, without having to sign up anywhere?
The documentation for Interledger appears to be for people who want to build software, not for people who want to send or receive money. And it talks about setting up accounts with xpring.io or rafiki.money.
I see no evidence that Interledger can be used for receiving money without having to set up accounts or run software. Plenty of evidence to the contrary.
As I said before, to receive bitcoin from one of these systems, there is nothing I should need to do other than advertise my bitcoin address. Anything more than that, and the system sucks.
