Disclaimer: I am deliberately avoiding edge cases and other costs of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin (BTC) is a relatively new system and we often make sense of new systems by drawing on familiar experiences to describe them, so it is natural to draw on experience with dollars and gold to understand Bitcoin. Like an ounce of gold, the price of a bitcoin can be measured in dollars. As the price of a bitcoin skyrocketed in 2013, it became a famous asset like dollars or gold but the current price of a bitcoin does not have much to do with why it is useful. Over most recent interval ranges, bitcoins do not seem to offer any advantage as a store of wealth. So, what’s curious about Bitcoin is that what it seems to be famous for is not why it is useful.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZefmK1tndc&w=560&h=315]
Update (June 15): Cyberwire on Google Play App Store
Cyberwire is an open source proof-of-concept for OpenTransact on Android. In the screencast, we see the Android app used to transfer 10 imaginary coffeebucks using one OpenTransact provider implementation. Even with a different OpenTransact provider implementation, we see the same functionality accessed by the same Android app.
OAuth Dynamic Client Registration Protocol is used to allow the Android app to start communicating with a new OpenTransact provider. A custom application_type request parameter is set to “noredirect” to indicate to the provider that instead of the client providing its own redirect_uri, the provider should choose a uri within its own domain and after authorization, the client will snarf the authorization code parameter from that uri instead of its own.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYLP3wMA width=“480” height=“405”]

In this screencast, we’ll improve the code introduced in the previous post OAuth Scopes with UMA Action URLs with the help of our friends Artifice and Cucumber.

Calls to Net::HTTP can be intercepted by Artifice and sent to your rack application instead of the network. If you are developing an OAuth provider, Artifice makes testing the api a lot easier. Since the OAuth ruby gem uses Net::HTTP, we can wrap Artifice blocks around our client calls in tests and Artifice will intercept the calls and route them to our Rails app.

In a recent South Park episode, Kyle is kidnapped and subjected to product prototyping (made of people) by employees of a large, cult-like tech company who explain that it is all justified: Kyle failed to read the complex terms and conditions he agreed to. Unfortunately, the risks of consenting to the agreement were not clear to Kyle.

There is a new hope. Earlier this week, Twitter announced more precise controls over permissions granted to third parties. Twitter wants to make the risks of consent more clear. Access to your direct messages should be on a need-to-know basis. Twitter says that by mid-June, when you grant a third-party permission to your twitter account, it will no longer be able to access your direct messages unless you have explicitly granted that particular type of access.

The previous screencast may have tried to use too much technology to enable user-centric simple web payments.

After looking around some, it occurred to me that the rel-payment microformat is not sweeping the world wide web. Using the Internet Archives, I found a blog post from July 2005 that announced support for rel-payment on blip.tv. I’m guessing not many people used this before it was abandoned.

An alternative to rel-payment is to simply use a convention. For instance, the path /blog is a convention to quickly find the blog for a site. On Twitter, this would normally represent the person with the Twitter handle “blog” but Twitter follows the convention and redirects to blog.twitter.com.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEe9dg5gRI&hl=en&fs=1]

Warning: I boosted the microphone amp on this one. :)

A blog is a great place to accept web payments. Livejournal, blogger and wordpress allow bloggers to make their blog url their OpenID. In this screencast, we see that when a blogger on Wordpress.com adds links, she can easily associate the type of link (through microformats). One microformat is rel-payment:

RelPayment is a microformat for making exchanges of support (be it financial or otherwise) possible. By adding rel=“payment” to a hyperlink a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink provides a way to show or give support for the current page. For example to give financial support to the owner of the current page.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2szB-qyWeA&hl=en&fs=1]

This screencast shows how simple web payments can be using OpenTransact. Instead of making a payment to an email address, we can make a payment to a URL, particularly if it is an OpenID.

The person making the payment simply adds a delicious-style bookmarklet and as you can see below, I simply re-used the javascript code for bookmarking a url on delicious and pointed it to a oscurrency financial service provider hosted on heroku.

Click To Play

The previous two screencasts demonstrated using Opentransact for simple web payments without using OAuth. Now we see how Opentransact web payments can be made with OAuth. Watch the original larger screencast to make reading the typing easier on the eyes.

To get OsCurrency to work with CapCard, I made this checkin.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiakCvGXMZQ&hl=en&fs=1&]

Here’s another OpenTransact demo. Last time, Nubux, a simple reference implementation, was the financial service provider. This time, OsCurrency is the FSP.

Comments

Author: Guillaume Lebleu

Date: 2009-07-27 23:05:53

Great Tom. Was wondering where the translation from “credits” to hours happens? If I remember correctly the OpenTransact spec, you post to a currency-specific URI. Do you have a /hours for OSCurrency?

Author: herestomwiththeweather

Date: 2009-07-28 02:44:24

That's right. Assuming the FSP site only has one kind of asset type, then it can just use /transacts (spec draft) like the demo did. However, in reality, demo.opensourcecurrency.org allows members to create their own currencies so i need to make friendly urls for each currency.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvlPTPUhHGU&hl=en&fs=1&]

There’s been some good discussion on the Agile Banking list which includes simple web payments. This is like what we did on the previous screencast but simpler (mostly because we’re not using oauth).

The use of the callback to confirm the payment can be trouble. The callback could timeout or maybe the merchant is inside a firewall for some reason and can’t be contacted from outside the firewall. In either case, If I’m selling pizzas, I’m not going to make the pizza if I don’t get the callback.