Comment by cornholio
9 months ago
A truly open payment protocol should handle any currency (not force you to adopt crypto coins) and would leave it to the merchant and buyer to agree on their settlement method or intermediary, the cancelation and dispute policy etc.
It's entirely possible then that some options would be available, for example in SEPA, that offer instant and irreversible settlement at zero cost.
(x402 author here) Thats actually exactly what the intention with x402 is. Merchants express to the buyer multiple ways that they accept payment and the buyer chooses the one they prefer. As of right now stablecoins on various crypto rails are the major form (largely because they're the easiest to start with from a development standpoint), but as Cloudflare indicated in their blogpost, they're proposing a scheme that uses deferred payment via credit card or ACH https://blog.cloudflare.com/x402/.
Hi Erik. Frankly, I wonder if this is an elaborate joke since there are some serious concerns in terms of CVP ("wait two seconds and retry"), in terms of gatekeeping potential nobody will sleepwalk in to ("we solve two the second wait with our CoinbaseCoin, get an enterprise subscription!"), or in terms of the inherent lack of openness in HTTP these days (client/server, HTTPS identity chains, DNS, gatekeepers like CloudFlare). For thoughts on a more open protocol without these drawbacks see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... Sincerely, architect of a predecessor exchange (founder asked me not to continue work on open protocols).
Thanks for stopping by.
How would you make it open and decentralized without crypto? I mean, you say it's only open if it supports all currencies, but I say it's only open if it supports all users and use cases, and that's a thing that non-crypto currencies don't do (except for Liberty Reserve, which got shut down by the government for precisely this reason). Like, it's not really open if they have the option to require you to have a Wells Fargo account. We're not falling for the HTTP Cloudflare-great-firewall trick again, I hope.
And for crypto payments they already don't need this because they can use the de-facto-standard Metamask API, at least for Ethereum-compatible blockchains.
Open just means the implementers of the protocol can select the settlement methods. Cryptocurrency allows in band settlement, but there is nothing wrong in principle with trusting finance institutions that the money really reached your account. So the settlement can be done out of band, using non-blockchain methods by mutually trusted financial institutions, just like credit card payments. It's cheaper, faster, simpler etc.
It's an economic and business problem, not a technical one: the incumbents earn massive fees and have very little incentive to innovate, while the disruptors can't reach the minimum critical mass they require to get rid of the damn credit cards (aka static passwords you need to disclose on the internet).
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> in SEPA, that offer instant and irreversible settlement at zero cost.
Note that SEPA is 100% not reversible. In fact, if you look at the scheme terms is absurdly reversible. There's a 8 week no questions asked refund window, so (for instance) one could pay your mortgage with SEPA and then automatically undebit their account up to 8 weeks later.
(Don't do this unless you're happy losing your property, not financial advice).
The customer can ask their bank anything, but the SEPA terms allow reversal for very strict scenarios, only if the payment was erroneous, it was duplicated by a human or technical errors, the wrong amount was sent etc. So the bank will refuse demands based on consumer protection reasons, they correctly fulfilled the customer request to send the money and further disputes are handled privately.
You might be referring to SEPA direct debit, which can be reversed unilaterally by the client at any point during the 8 weeks. These are payments initiated by the merchant, using an already established direct debit channel.
Yeah, I was referring to SEPA direct debit (consumer), rather than the business one which has the terms you describe in your first paragraph. Sepa consumer is a lot more common though.
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What's the difference between spending USDC and USD via a credit card? I don't get the hatred for anything crypto.