EB118 – Manu Sporney: W3C, Making Payments A Web Standard

Transcript

[Music] This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by Hi. Me. Protect yourself against hackers and safeguard your identity online with a First ClassVPN. Go to hi.me/epicenter and sign up for a free account today. [Music] Hi, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebastio and I am Me Roy. Uh today we have a very interesting conversation

lined up for you with Manus Pony. He's a founder and CEO of digital bazar and a chairman for the web payments credentials and JSON LD community groups at the worldwide web consortium that's W3C. He spends most of his time driving the creation of open standards and open technology that will integrate link data, open identity and payments into the core architecture of the web. So before we start uh Manu, we'd like to know a bit bit more about your background and how you got interested in web standards in the first place.

Uh sure. Hey uh thanks for having me today. Um my background is as a computer scientist. So I have a a computer science degree. Um I've always been very interested in uh primarily computer graphics but also decentralized systems. Um so uh I got first got interested in decentralized systems um building things like render farms uh and and serve farms like that. Um, and then later, uh, right in my senior year of college, ended up, uh, launching, uh, my first startup, um, and we basically ported Linux to the PlayStation 2, uh, and did a whole bunch

of like, uh, audio player for Linux and, uh, game development, uh, on Linux on the PlayStation 2. Uh, and shortly thereafter, you know, we launched a um, one of the first online music stores u, but on the on the PlayStation 2. And that kind of uh moved us in the direction of figuring out if there was a a better way for artists to be paid, a more fair way for digital content to be distributed over decentralized networks and for those payments to be made over those decentralized networks. Uh so that's when we uh launched uh our current company. Uh so this is my third company. Um, this company's focus,

Digital Bizaar's focus is basically uh figuring out a way uh for uh humankind to monetize uh the stuff that they do more fluidly. So, you know, our ideal world is people effectively do what they naturally want to do, right? They work on the things that they love and as a side effect of them working on those things there is a um value dissemination structure behind it. Like they get paid to basically when they sit down at a computer and write code or they get paid whenever they start writing music and you know sending it out to the web and making money off of it um is this really fluid thing. It's not like it's today

where, you know, you sit down, you write some music, and there's this hard stop, and then you have to go look for a publisher, and then there's this hard stop wait, and then you have to wait, you know, for for your music to be distributed. Um, and ultimately, we'd like people to have a more direct control over how they're paid, when they're paid, uh, things of that nature. So that's kind of um where my interest in in uh decentralized systems uh decentralized payments uh and decentralized identity uh came from and uh well that that's interesting because we also sort of create content that we'd like to get paid for and we don't have direct payment from our uh

from our listeners. Uh of course we do have some tips but most of our most of our revenue comes from advertisers. So you know monetizing content is is is is a topic that I had never really been concerned about up until you know we started episode 100 or two years ago and uh it is it is uh it is it is a topic that uh does occupy my mind quite a bit even though we don't really make any money personally from center but just trying to pay bills and pay for the team and everything. Um and uh so what are your interests like you know do you have any interests in Bitcoin and blockchain specifically? Is that something that Oh absolutely. Yeah absolutely. I mean you know the uh there's a deep interest

there. We talk quite a bit with uh folks in the Bitcoin and blockchain uh community. Um, and you know, honestly, like the the blockchain is, you know, I'm thrilled that so many people are talking about this stuff that people in the 80s and 90s were talking about, right? So, I mean, like this this is like, you know, it it wraps fantastic things together like, you know, decentralized systems wrap with peer-to-peer networks uh and, you know, some uh deep deep uh uh cryptography. Like you combine all those things together and that's like that's fantastic stuff. Like that's worldchanging stuff. And it's it's nice to see that Bitcoin finally got that conversation into the public because

this is a conversation that has been going on in the cipher punk world, the you know crypto world since the the 80s and the 90s. Um so yeah, a very very deep interest and deep engagement with the the Bitcoin community. So uh so let's first start with understanding uh what the W3C is like. Uh sure personally I'm I'm new to the software world myself uh and Bitcoin got me in this path. So I've I always heard about the W3C but I couldn't really describe uh how it works and what are the past successes. So could you go into what W3C tries to do, how it does it and what have been successes? Sure. So um to

ask answer your last question first uh the W3C standardized the web. So if you're using the web you have them to thank for doing that. Um really you know sir Tim Burners Lee is the uh person that uh did a lot of the him and Robert Kell did a lot of the initial work um on the idea behind the web. Um but it wasn't long before they had to start standardizing things. So you got interoperability. Uh and so certain Lee uh helped uh found the worldwide web consortium back in the early 90s. Um and uh that's where you know the initial version of like HTTP happened. Uh that's where HTML happened. Um you know you've

got SVG CSS. Anything that you use to build the web was standardized at the W3C many many many years ago. Um so uh the W3C has grown since then. I mean it started out as just like this handful of you know people and companies. Um but it has grown to around 400 member companies and every large technology company you can think of is a part of W3C. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, US Federal Reserve, Bloomberg like they're you know the list goes on and on. 400 plus members. Um and basically these members decide what the next generation web and um internet is going to look like right so there are

really two bodies that do standardization around internet and web uh the internet engineering task force IETF works on protocol level stuff that's like the base layer communication stuff and then the W3C works on like the higher level application stuff like HTML 5 and CSS3 three um and a variety of other you know technologies like that. Um so so you know anyone that uses the web like all of us right now you're on a web page like listening to this or you use a web page to download it the W3C is the organization that figures out how that technology is going to work uh and

how we're going to get massive interoperability um around those technologies. Right? And I I think most people don't realize the important role that the W3C has made in just making the web just usable. I mean, I remember being a teenager and writing web pages and creating web pages back in the late 90s and having to write, you know, this was the era the era uh during which you had to specify which browser your um your web page would work on. And that just kept going, you know, into the mid 2000s up until sometime in like late, you know, late 2000s. Uh things started to started to coagulate and and become, you

know, a lot more standardized. Uh that was sort of nightmare era. Even even though even though there was a W3C, there was still a lot of problems with standards that you just have seemed to have really smoothed out these last couple years. Um, well that's good that it looks like that from the outside. Well, there's still it's still rough going. You know, I'm not doing I'm not doing as much web development as I was, but I remember doing web development back in the days of IE6 and it was it was really it's gotten a lot better. Absolutely. It's gotten a lot better.

So, can you walk us through? I have a rough idea but it's always great to have a refresher of the the process through which the W3C standardizes uh you know a technology something like HTML 5 for example. Sure. Um HTML 5 is a pretty complex one. Uh let me just speak generically. So typically you have um all the W3C members and and W3C is constantly keeping an eye out for new technologies that might need to be standardized. So there are these groups called community groups at the W3C. I think there's something like 800 of them. Like there's an insane number of

them. And each one deals with something you know different like one of them deals with like uh pointer events. Another one deals with like you know credentials. Another one deals with web payments. Another one deals with uh crypto ledgers like blockchain like stuff. Another one's working on inner ledger. So you have all these community groups and they're super experimental but there are a bunch of people that are kind of saying hey there's some interesting you know technical stuff happening in this area. um let's keep an eye on it and figure out if there's something we can standardize around it.

Um there are other people that are uh you know saying look this problem exists today like let's look at canvas the canvas element in HTML and so let's get together and like propose a solution and get it in the browser as quickly as possible because for example like video game developers are having a really hard time deploying games on the web and if we want the web to be this ubiquitous thing we need to support them right so you get a community group together you work on the technology um and that usually at least you know lasts you know some of these things have been incubating for like four years some of them incubate for like 6 months and launch right so first stage is incubation next stage is to convince the W3C membership that they should spend

their effort in trying to standardize this right and so you have to go around and basically talk to organizations like Google and Microsoft uh and you know Facebook and Twitter and get them to agree that they're going to hack, you know, the standardization around this work that they're going to say, hey, you know what, this is important to us. So, we will send a couple of engineers into a working group to work on this stuff. So, that's kind of like the chartering process. So, step one is experiment uh and incubate. Step two is charter the work to happen and get buy from the membership. And then step three is basically do the work. Sit down in a working group. you've got, you know, the best minds from all the top technology

companies in the world, uh, sitting in there, um, trying to figure out the one way that we're going to implement this stuff, uh, in the browser or, you know, in in on the internet in general. Um, and then that's like, you know, an allout technical brawl slugfest for like two to four years. And you know after everyone emerges all bruised and bloodied uh you have like a technical standard you have an international standard like you get you have at the end of that you have HTML 5 or you have CSS3 or you have XML right um so each one of those things went through that process um and it can be as quick as two years to get through the process which

sounds really long but it's really not like you have to get 50 companies to agree on the one way to do thing that's one way to do things that's really hard. Um, but some of them like you know HTML 5 dragged out for like some people you know would assert that it dragged out for like 12 years, right? Um, so it's that's the general process. It's it's incubate and then launch the official work and then do the technical work and get the standard done. that uh it's funny because when you look at us like when you look at HTML 5 or when you look at XML or or any of these standards after they've come out of that process you just look at them and you think of course of course that's how you

should do it you know it seems so obvious and uh what what seems sort of funny as well is that you know a lot of what you mentioned there so that that period uh during which uh everybody's trying to agree on the standard looks a lot like what's happening in Bitcoin you know it does echo echo that uh that same sort of process that the the Bitcoin community is going through right now regarding block size and such things um only maybe with less um which is less standardized and and um and for where there's less formality and right there's less structure and legal there's less structure that's right yeah

I mean so so a lot of people don't you know we're a number of us in the standards world who have been at ITF and W3C for a long time and have gone through like all the painful painful work to just set up a process where people can come together and agree on something right and you don't have like five people running the show and and you know 50 people just sitting back and you saying stop please and having absolutely no power to do anything like we've seen that happen at ITF and we've seen that happen at W3C and Oasis and there all these standardization bodies uh that went through this and we're watching the same thing kind of like play out in the Bitcoin world and many of us are like going in and going like please please

like follow some of the models that have been tried and true like we we know how to at least set up the infrastructure where people can get together and make consensus decisions uh you know peacefully without having to do you know things like forking the blockchain and and things of that nature. But um I think you know part of it is that that the Bitcoin community is um fairly young and inexperienced in that uh realm. And that's like not that's not a bad thing. Like a lot of people think I'm I'm kind of like you know saying h they're they're you know they're not doing it right. Um but uh their benefits for getting kind of a fresh approach like something that might come out of

the BIPS and the way Bitcoin community is um doing this stuff is a new process around agreeing on on technology. Um but I'm fairly skeptical that that's what's going to come out. And I think what's going to come out of it is like you're going to end up taking bits and pieces of ITF and W3C and maybe there's a new standardization body for Bitcoin or Bitcoin decides to start standardizing at ITF and uh W3C. Um you know it's it's hard it's hard to it's hard to say. None of these none of these um uh infrastructures for coming to consensus on really hard technical technical uh systems that span the globe like global technical systems none of them are

without their warts right so like W3C almost really screwed up HTML 5 in fact they didn't work on X HTML 5 they worked on XHTML 2 for like five or six years they worked on the wrong thing right and and it and and the browser manufacturers basically broke off of W3C and were basically and basically said, "You're not solving the problems that web developers have. We have to listen to web developers. So, we're going to go off. We're going to break off into this group called the whatw um and we're going to develop HTML 5 there." And so, like the spec editor for HTML 5 basically was like, I'm going to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

I'm going to go over here. Once you guys come to your senses, come and let us know. Right? Until then, we're going to start shipping new product and browsers. And that's when like you started seeing some of these new HTML 5 features happening. So, even a community as like um uh you know in in in internet time scales as old as the W3C or the IETF, even an organization like that has problems where uh community you know, the community splits uh for some reason. But ultimately HTML 5 was brought back into the W3C. You got buy in from all these other companies, not just the browser manufacturers. Uh and it worked out. But those types of struggles are the same types of struggles we're seeing

in the Bitcoin community these days. And it's and it's frustrating to see like folk other folks go through it and you know trying and you know we go out and we try to help but it's you know it's it's not I don't think the Bitcoin community is ready yet to engage on a broader scale right know I I think we've mentioned it on the show before that there there there would be some benefit to to the Bitcoin protocol being part of the W3C or or ITF. Uh do you have any thoughts on that? Is is that is that something that would be advisable or desirable for Bitcoin? Does it need to be another standardizing body in your

opinion? So, you know, I I want I'm trying to let's remove all the political charge from the question, right? Um so maybe it's not the W3C that's the right place. Maybe it's not ITF, but there is a need for some place where people can get together and make decisions on the protocol. Um, there is currently, you know, the there's really only one software base for Bitcoin, right? Let me let me compare and contrast. So, the web um and the internet have many many many different clients.

There's not just one HTTP client or two HTTP clients. There are hundreds of them. And the reason there are hundreds of them is because there are standards. They're documents that actually say this is exactly what the protocol is. If you don't do X, Y, and Z in this order, you're violating the protocol. You can choose to do that, but you're not going to be able to interoperate with the hundred other HTTP clients out there, right? Um, Bitcoin doesn't have the same thing going on right now. like there are bits and pieces that are written down here and there, but there's there's still like there's kind of still the code base and the five core maintainers, right? Um the W3C and ITF, you know, discovered many many years ago in the

late 80s and early 90s that it's really dangerous to have. It doesn't matter how awesome the five people that are at the core of the thing are. Um that is dangerous, right? because that means that there's a centralization of power in in decision-m. Um and so um the idea that you have a set of protocols that are written down and you have hundreds of implementers of that pro of those protocols um that has that that is the only thing that I know of these days that actually um gets the right technical solutions uh technical and political solutions implemented. Right? So, so you know

maybe Bitcoin goes into W3C, maybe they go into ITF, maybe the Bitcoin Foundation or Bitcoin whatever creates their own standard setting standard setting organization. Um, but I think the end result has to be the Bitcoin protocol or whatever it ends up turning into is clearly documented. There's a clear set of test suites around it. uh and there are 50 implementers of clients for uh Bitcoin, right? That's that's where you want to go. I think getting there is still, you know, questionable.

I I would imagine like if I had to take a shot at it, I would say the ITF is the best place uh for Bitcoin to go to standardize, but you know, that's not that's I don't know if that's really going to happen anytime soon. Personally, I suspect the Bitcoin community wouldn't uh wouldn't want to go down a path like that. Like you you feel the need for governance, but then you also somehow want to have the anarchy also. There are two ways to approach that statement, right? One of them is like the political direction and the other one is the technical direction. So the technical answer for that is pretty easy like build extensibility into the core of the protocol. you can have

technical anarchy if you do that, right? So you you say, you know, these are the ways that the Bitcoin protocol can be extended. Uh or you come up with some kind of generalized extensibility mechanism and you know, go for it. Like look at the web, right? No one's telling anyone how to build a website. People are just sitting down and writing code and and building websites, right? It's total anarchy when it gets to that point, right? But getting a web page from point A to point B, we need we need to have some amount of standardization around that because we want everyone on the planet to be able to go to your site and get that page, right? But what's on that page and how your JavaScript executes totally up to you, right? So

there, so you can have the whole you can have you can build a really chaotic uh anarchist system on top of uh a solid foundation, a solid communication foundation, right? And and that's really the point like you don't want to standardize too much. You want to standardize enough so that there's interoperability, but not so much that you kill off innovation. And that's a really hard um uh kind of balance to meet. Um now going at that statement from a political direction um there's a lot of drama in Bitcoin, right? Um a there's a lot of politics being played in Bitcoin. Um and um I

tend to be fairly disinterested in that stuff, right? I'm more focused on the technical stuff and and ensuring that people can innovate and uh innovate on top of the technical platform. Um but having an infrastructure that tamps down on the drama and the politics and gets people to focus on the technology um is really useful, right? So, um I think the W3C and the ITF are fairly good at that. They're fairly good at I mean there's there's always politics. anytime that there's a lot of money involved, there's going to be politics. Um, but, uh, setting up an infrastructure where you can effectively tamp down the politics and the, um, uh, politics and the drama

that's, you know, kind of plaguing the Bitcoin community in my opinion at this point. Um, having an infrastructure where you can do that is is super helpful. Right. [Music] Let's take a short break and talk about Hi. Me. Have you ever tried watching streaming TV from abroad? If you have, you've probably been greeted with an annoying error message written by some idiot lawyer telling you that you have no rights and you can't watch this program from outside the country. This used to happen to Sebastian all the time when he was in lonely France trying to watch his favorite moose hockey game in Canada. And you wouldn't believe how angry he got. That's where most of his gray hair comes from. With Hi. Me, this painful phase of my life is now over.

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And the premium plan gives you a lot. It gives you unlimited data. You can use as much as you want. You can connect up to five devices. So, your whole household fits on the plan and you can use any of their exit nodes all over the world and they've got like 30 of them. And of course, you can pay with Bitcoin. So, give it a try. We would like to thank Kite. for their support of epenter bitcoin. For this podcast, uh we are going to walk through two two of the topics that you are involved in in W3C and and I've thought about quite a lot. And uh for our listeners uh Manu has a really nice website where uh he writes blogs about mainly two topics like credentials on

the web and payments on the web and he has written like very detailed analyses of all of the different uh projects that have come before trying to solve credentials on the web and what was missing with with them and why didn't they didn't succeed. Since the bitcoin community is also so interested in the problem of identity, we thought it would be nice to invite Manu and walk through his experiences uh regarding credentials on the web. So the first question then is um what is the core problem with credentials on the web and why hasn't it been solved for I don't know 20 years.

Sure. Um so let's see. Um I think the the core problem there there are many many problems. So so let's talk about identity on the web. Every time um uh this thing kind of comes up the the problem gets bigger and bigger and bigger until we're talking about fixing identity on the web. Um and the problem with identity on the web is it means very different things to very different people. It means something different to governments. It means something different to individuals. it means something different to corporations. Um, so what you end up with at the end is trying to solve this massive massive problem and you make almost no there there's no traction you know on on doing

it. So um the work at the W3C and let me underscore that this is experimental work. Um right now there is an official task force looking at verifiable claims and credentials uh on the web. Um, and what we're focusing on, uh, is a fairly small, we're trying to focus on a pretty small scope. So, we're basically saying, um, it is really hard for people to do things like show their driver's license on the web. It's really hard for people to prove that they're over the age of 21 or prove that they have a passport or prove that they are they they graduated from a particular uh, school. Um, to prove that they have a certain skill set. All super difficult things to do

online. And what we end up falling back to is just self-reported information, right? So if you go and you look at LinkedIn, you look at someone's LinkedIn profile, you have no idea if they actually did those things, right? It's just people self asserting a bunch of information. So, um, the verifiable claims and the credentials work at the W3C, um, are focusing on how do you send someone a digitally signed claim that was issued to you by some organization like the Department of Motor Vehicles um, in a way that can can be trusted, right? In a way that can't be forged uh, and it kind of lives with you. It's it's it's user centric meaning

like you are in control of those credentials. Um, so think think about this this analogy like you have a wallet and you have a bunch of, you know, pieces of paper stuffed in there and it so happens that when you pull out one of those pieces of paper and wave it in front of someone, all of a sudden they can trust that you're licensed to drive or that you're over a certain age, right? You can't do that on the web very easily, right? I could, you know, we're we're in video chat right now. I could pull out my driver's license and show it to you, but you have no idea if I just like photocopied that thing on a high quality printer or not. Right? So, what you actually need is a digitally signed claim from the Department of Motor Vehicles saying that I am licensed to

drive. Right? So, that's that's the problem we're focusing on. How, you know, what does that credential look like? Can we make that credential format the same for health care and finance and government and all these different organizations? Um, you know, all these different market verticals. And then what does the protocol for exchanging that look like? How do you issue a credential? How do you give the credential over to someone? And then where do they store it? Do they store it on their mobile phone in a cloud somewhere? How do we make that thing privacy enhancing? And then when they go to a place that actually wants them uh to use that credential, how do we then um prove that or how does that organization ask for that credential?

Give me your driver's license. What's the technical equivalent of that on the internet and the web? So that's in in a nutshell that's what the credentials work uh and the verifiable claims work at the worldwide web consortium are trying to tackle. They're trying to say they're trying to see should we start a standardization initiative around this if so what kind of technology are we going to use for it so Manu I'd like to ask that isn't isn't this a problem that is nearing a solution for example um I've I've seen in the Bitcoin community these companies like I I forgot the name of the best one of them but it's really good their service they basically have a way by which I can display my identity over my webcam my and uh and they have a way of uh

detecting frauds over over the webcam. So um basically if I display my driving license uh it it works for IDs of 180 countries and if I'm displaying a fraud then then the server on the other side will know it's a fraud and basically uh any company could integrate with this solution. So for example, Facebook could integrate with their solution and Facebook could know that yeah, I have a driver's license and it's genuine and then they could they could sign the statement that they have verified this claim. So isn't this something that could be solved through machine learning and these techniques? Do we really need do we really need something at the core of the web to solve it or is it

attackable through machine learning? Um let me there are three points that you made there that I thought were interesting. Uh the first one is um there exists a company that can do this right. Um and if everyone were to just use that company then the problem would be solved right. So that is fundamental fundamentally anti-web and anti-in. There shouldn't be just one company with the capability of doing that. There should be a thousand companies with the capability of doing that because if you have one or five companies doing that, they're going to own that market and charge terrible rates to their customers, right? We want an

interoperable standard, right? So, so you know, I tend to be fairly um whenever somebody says there is a company that can already do this out there, the first question is how many competitors can there be to that one company, right? And how hard it is how hard is it for those people to compete with the company? If it takes $10 million to get to the point that that company's at um then that is not a good technology for you know it's it's just you don't have competition in the in the marketplace right um and that's primarily what the web and the internet you know the ITF want you have Google and Microsoft and you know Apple uh involved none of them are going to seed

that the solution to that problem to a single company right um so that was that was the first first uh point that you made that I thought was interesting. Um so you know the the the W3C and most of the folks most of the W3C member companies keep an eye out for companies like that ones that are solving hard you know hard problems like that. um but tend to be fairly skeptical of the solution unless they can actually see exactly how it works in running code because it turns out that a lot of those companies that are making those claims I mean they're like a I don't know hundreds of identity verification identity proofing companies that have you know that solution but you dig into

the technology on a good chunk of them and it turns out that uh they're providing a whole bunch of false positives, as in like they say they actually checked a lot of that information, but it turns out that it's really easy to fake it. Um, and for the ones that do actually have a good solution, um, that good solution is never going to be ubiquitous and universal, um, unless they have an enormous jump on the market or the large companies like Google and Facebook and Apple are willing to seed that market to them. It's too small for them to care about, right? Um, okay. So, so that was the first thing like you know, yes,

companies like that exist. Uh, they're not really interesting at web scale or internet scale unless they have a big jump on uh the the market like Adobe did with, you know, PDF or uh Skype did with uh you know, calls and communication, right? Um there are always those unicorns out there but you know by and large they do not make for good internet and web standards. Um okay so so that's the the first part. The second part was like you know we have machine learning we have all these other technologies um couldn't we just apply that to the problem?

Um, and I think the simple answer to that is not everyone has access to those technologies, right? So, think about a community college that wants proof that you went to high school before they admit you into the community college. Um, that organization is not a technology organization. They knew they know absolutely nothing about machine learning. Um, and if who they um divvy that work out to, the the like identity proofing work out to, if that person, you know, if that organization has a corner on the market and they're charging, you know, $15 per identity check, then that's an enormous amount of money to the to that community college.

If there was a competitive market in instead, then all of a sudden um that community college can uh um bother with doing background checks and checking to see if the, you know, the digital signature on that person's credential, you know, checks out, they can do that for like pennies on the dollar instead of paying the like 15 to $30 they they pay now. Okay. And so, well, I think we can all agree that I having a sort of centralized solution that, you know, is is that is IP that's owned by a company is probably not a good a good fit for a web standard. Um, although you know, PDF and Skype are some exceptions to that as you mentioned. Uh, but, uh, you know,

there there's some there's some protocols out I mean, we've had on the show one name. We've also had recently um a gentleman uh which I forgot his name. His name escapes me right now who's working on the identify protocol. And the the identify protocol does something really really interesting where anybody can uh create uh an identity for for himself or multiple identities and then the identity is corroborated by a web of trust. So essentially, you know, other people come and and and sort of say that what you're saying is true. And that could be, you know, your friends saying that you are who you say you are, that you work here, and that you've worked here in the past, or it could be like the DMV saying that, yes, of course, your driver's license is

valid. What do you think of this kind of system? Do you think this is a good way to solve the problem of identity online? So, so I I'm not deeply familiar with the protocol and the technology. So, I can't say definitively one way or the other if right. But you're familiar with the concept of web of trust, right? Web of trust. Yeah. So, so let's talk about web of trust. So, web of trust has been around for a really long time since the '9s, right? PGP was the first kind of web of trust. Um, and it didn't scale really well because of key management issues. um identify might be really interesting because um you know depending on how they depending on how they do it um uh having other people vouch for you um is a powerful thing. Um

but if you you know if you look at these web of trusting I'm I'm a deep believer in web of trust like I wish that's the way stuff worked. Um I think you could get rid of a lot of middlemen uh if you did that. Um the problem with web of trust is that it's very difficult to determine who's a liar and who's not. Um so if your your web of trust uh ends up kind of devolving into you delegating who you trust to a larger organization and them delegating it up to a larger organization and you effectively end up with a certificate authority model that we have right now. Right? So, um, we we now that's not to say that inevitably you end up in the certificate

authority model because the CA model is a terrible trust model, right? I mean, we've got, you know, if you look at your browser and you look at all the CAS that you trust, there's this giant laundry list of them, including the US and China CAS. So, the US on a regular basis signs things saying that, yeah, of course, we're a Chinese website. And the Chinese government on a fairly regular basis signs certificates saying, "Yeah, of course we're the US government, right?" Or, "We're US based. You know, you're really talking to Google, trust us." Right? So, um, like the CA model's broken. Um, the web of trust model doesn't really scale very well. The final solution is probably somewhere in this in the middle like you choose which

uh organizations you you trust. Um but there has to be some amount of delegation of responsibility. Uh so it's somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, you know, pure web of trust and pure CA model. Um but I mean I think you know they're on the right path, right? So the idea that you can have multiple identities, great idea. Everyone should be able to have multiple identities, one for your home life, one for your work life, all that kind of stuff. Um, should other people be able to make non-reputable statements about you? Um, that you are a good person or you have a certain credit score? Yeah, absolutely. That's definitely something that we need to do. Should you be in

control of uh those digital credentials so that you only expose the digital credentials that you want to to the organizations and people that you want to? Yeah. Absolutely. Right. You need to be in control of the ecosystem. it doesn't need to be locked into some kind of service provider that's going to hold you hostage, right? So that you can't leave, right? So all of these are all of these are really good. Um they're they're it's a good model. Um the question is how do you hit scale with it, right? So you can hit scale with it by being a really really really successful open-source project like Linux, right? Or OpenStack. Um you can hit scale by uh just cornering the

market before anyone knows what's going on, right? Like Skype um and uh you know Adobe um uh with with Flash and and and um you know PDF um or you can try to slug it out in the standardization route and try to get all these big companies to agree on um a standard way of doing something. So that's also a, you know, a potential. Yeah, that's a it does seem like a like a pretty like a fairly big challenge since you you wrote a really interesting article on your on your blog where you go through most of the major identity credential systems that have come and gone since uh since the dawn of

the internet and now we have these new systems coming out. uh and you know in in any case most of them some of them are good at certain things and and and while they fail at other things and there's really uh there seems to be a problem just hitting all of the all of the sort of requirements for a good identity system. you asked a question, you know, what about all these solutions that have existed before um uh these identity solutions like uh SAML and open ID connect uh and um uh you know open ID 10 and and login with Google and login with Facebook. So I think those were trying to address the single sign on problem and they were thinking about verifiable

claims and identity as kind of this secondary thing. Um, and so, you know, they're good at what they were designed to do. They were never designed to exchange verifiable claims and prove someone's identity online. That was not the primary goal. The other thing that was not a primary goal was this concept that you would control your identity, right? Your identity was portable. Your credentials were portable. You have to look at like, you know, who put together Open ID Connect. uh it was effectively Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Do they want you leaving their networks? Of course not. Right? So because of the organizations involved um the end result

ends up looking you know a certain way and it's not very user centric in the end. Today's magic word is standard. s t a n d a r d. Head over to let's talk bitcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener [Music] reward. So the other the other other thing like manu you've really been interested in is uh is somehow having a standard way on the web to to send and receive payments and uh to standardize the payment experience for everybody in the web. Can you give us a vision for

what a standardized payment experience for everybody really means and how is it different from the experience today? What's what's really missing out here? The web payments work at the W3C started around 5 years ago, right? So um it started in a community group um and we were trying to convince uh the W3C uh and the ITF that um we should try and standardize the way values exchanged over the internet. So this was pre bitcoin like by this was actually it started before that but this was pre this pre bitcoin right and we were basically saying um we need to figure out a way you know paying for things

online is not only a pain um but it is also uh rife with fraud right you know you think if you think about making a payment online it's kind of ridiculous from a security standpoint you go to a website that you've never been to before they ask you for your credit card number. You pull out a piece of plastic from your wallet. You type in your credit card number along with everything that need, you know, is needed to to process that credit card without it being present. And then you hit send, right? And then you pray that it's not that the credit cards uh that that you didn't just send it to someone that was going to steal it um steal your credit card. Um so that's that's the first thing that that happens. The second

thing is like the site that you just uploaded your credit card number to, you have no idea what their security practices are, right? And if when we found as we found out in the Target and the PF Changs, you know, breakin and the Home Depot breakin, like even the major major retailers have no idea um how to protect those numbers because quite honestly there is no good way to protect those numbers, right? There are secrets that if you get that secret, it is a password into your bank account. anyone can use that number to pull any, you know, a good chunk of money uh out of your account. So, we were looking at this problem on the web and we were like, there's got to be a better way to do this, right? I mean, we have really strong crypto these days. We know how to

um you know uh pass around tokens uh for payments. What if we routed payments not over these old networks, but over the core of the web and the internet? Um, and what if we made it possible for you to pay in any currency or any, you know, over any payment network and we and we built that ability into the web, right? There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to go to a store, click pay, see a total, and hit yes, I want to buy that thing, and you not transmit, you know, your credit card numbers. there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to pick Bitcoin as a potential payment mechanism or US dollars or euro um or your credit card. Like there there's like all of

these things should be possibilities. It's just not built into the core of the web. Um, so what we did is we we started on a 5-year journey to try and convince the W3C and banks and financial industry and technologists that we should standardize um the uh way payments are made uh online. So that was kind of the genesis um of of that work and it took years to it took years to convince these organizations that that we should try and standardize payments on the web. How is it possible that it took 25 years to get to even just discussing it? Like did did I'm curious like did the invention of Bitcoin have anything to do with sort

of getting that ball moving or sort of getting giving giving people inside maybe the W3C or the industry that payments instantaneous payments were possible and there were other ways to think about how we were paying online. So, you know, I think Bitcoin helped us convince people that um there were other ways to pay other than just Visa and Mastercard and cash and that it is possible to have a purely digital currency and settle within, you know, minutes if not seconds over the web and the internet, right? That's what Bitcoin did. As far as convincing them to start the work, no, not really. And

and the reason was because no one from the Bitcoin community came with us to the W3C to make a case for it. And still to this day, there is like not a single Bitcoin uh there's not a single Bitcoin company uh that's deeply involved in the work, which is frustrating because we want them to be there. Like we really really want the Bitcoin community to engage, but for a variety of reasons, they're not. Um, and you know, I shouldn't say we and them. There are a number of people in the group that are deep, deep believers in Bitcoin. Um, you know, I'm one of the spec editors for the um, web payments community group specs, and I made it a point to put

Bitcoin in there as a payment mechanism, right? But there are people that are saying, "Rip it out. We don't have any Bitcoin company that's asking for us to do that." and until they join and they say that they want to be a part of this work, we shouldn't put it in there. So, like that's one of the fights that's kind of happening right now. But going back to your original question, like why did it take so long? Um, I think there are two there's really there are two reasons why it took so long. The first is like we tried this in 1999 and failed miserably. like there was this like I don't remember I don't know if you remember but there was this you know idea of like peppercoin and microp

payments back in 98 and 99 um and the W3C started this initiative to try and make microp payments uh in paying for content work uh in the late 90s um and a bunch of academics got involved no one from industry got involved and it just melted down there would nothing happened as a result of it right and so W3C basically said usually when you try something at W3C and it fails miserably they're like okay we'll come and revisit this in you know 5 to 10 years right so you have to wait 5 to 10 years to try again we started trying in around 2008 2007208 um meaning like I I would go to like Cyos and talk about you know the web

payments initiative it was just a lot of just going to conferences and talking to people and saying hey wouldn't it be great if we had a standard for payments on the web and getting buy in. Um and eventually we got enough momentum like Bloomberg joined and the US Federal Reserve joined and at that point like W3C started taking us seriously and then once we you know we had a workshop we got a number of banks you know involved and then you know Microsoft and Google and Apple started showing up to the meetings uh and after that we had you know a decent bit of momentum. Um so so the first reason was there was a really bad failure in 2000 and we didn't feel like we could do anything for a while.

Um the second reason which I think is way more interesting is is that it was really hard for us to even have the discussion with developers that they had any part to play in this because payments is something the banks do. It's not something that I as a web developer, it's not something that I as a web developer do. Payments is something that the banks do. Uh and because of that, I have no power to change anything. Right?

So, Bitcoin changed that conversation. I, you know, it was, you know, for two years prior, you know, we'd go into a group and we'd be like, "Okay, who wants to join us?" No hands would go up. And we were like, "This would change the way people exchange value over the web. It would make it so that people could work on the things that they love and get uh you know get rewarded for it just through the web. It would be this nice flow of like value exchange. You know, isn't that a future all of you believe in? And everyone would be like, yeah. And then, you know, we'd say, okay, come and help us build this future. And they'd be like, h I don't know if I know enough about payments to really do anything about it. And you know, it took a lot of like explaining. Like we would

have to sit down with developers and basically say you realize that payments is just adding you know subtracting a number from one database column and adding it to the other database column. It's not more, you know, it's no, it's really no more complicated than that, right? Well, I I mean I would Yeah, sure. But then you need to have consensus over, you know, that's what that's what Byzantine fall tolerance solves, right? Well, that true, right? That it solves it in a decentralized way, right? But there are centralized ways that you could have solved this problem before Bitcoin. There's no reason like, you know, for this web payment stuff to start, you didn't need Bitcoin, right? It's great that Bitcoin's here. We definitely want to

use it as part of the next generation solution. But the I it's it's the it's the mental model that a lot of web developers had. I have no part to play in the way value is moved around the world, right? And I think the Bitcoin, you know, the bitcoin changed that dynamic a bit. We definitely saw a very sharp uptick in people joining the web payments community group after all the bitcoin stuff was was going on. Um, so the second thing was just a mindset thing. You know, developers didn't think they had any part to play. Now they know that they do. And so it's much easier to to get something off the ground when when that mindset has been

changed. So now from the mindset that developers have nothing to do with payments, we have come to this set where we have everything to do with payments and there are just too many different alternatives. So uh we have uh we have like cryptocurrencies. Then we have like something like ripple. Then we have interledger which is uh which if our listeners don't know about is ripple's new project where they figure out a way by which you can move value across two crypto ledgers in a peer-to-peer fashion. And then you have now these u for lack of a better word these bank grade blockchains where which is like bank sharing a blockchain.

So we have a lot of different ideas uh in our in our community and which ones do you find interesting from the perspective of the worldwide web consortium? I mean all of them right all of them have some pretty interesting ideas uh that um I mean the way yeah all of them all of them are interesting because all of them have some really interesting uh concepts that the other other ideas don't right and standardization is fundamentally picking the best ideas from a bunch of different solutions and trying to make them stick together in some kind of cohesive way.

Um sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't. The other thing about standardization is you're trying to generalize the solution so that um if you had a general solution, uh a bunch of different technologies based off of blockchain or based off of decentralized ledgers um uh could kind of spring forth from from the that work. Um so uh yeah, I mean all of them are interesting uh in in their own way. Um the inner ledger work is being incubated at the W3C. It's a community group at the W3C. Um uh the bank blockchains thing is uh kind of frustrating um because there's already a bunch of people working in public around

it. And you know I think the banks you know the banks see just about everything as like a competitive advantage right and if they own it they own the competitive advantage right um but banks are also not technology companies they don't understand that there is well I I shouldn't say this they understand that having common infrastructure is important um but they want to own as much of the infrastructure as possible because it's a competitive advantage right the one of the one of The things that a a a banker said to me once that has really stuck with me was that, you know, fraud's not an issue for us the bank, right? Because all those costs are effectively pushed on to the customer.

There's some countries where that's not allowed, but by and large those costs are pushed on to the customer, right? So, you know, what's our competitive advantage? Our competitive advantage is saying that it is safer to use a Visa card that we issue because we will look out for fraudulent activity because we have the best fraud detection programs in the world. That's our competitive advantage. It is not a competitive advantage to remove all the fraud in the system because if we were to do that then we'd be back to square one competing on a le level playing field with all the other banks in the world and we absolutely don't want that to happen. Right. Yeah, I mean like this is kind of one of the one of the

interesting features of bank like one of the interesting properties of bank rate blockchains that by definition it seems to be a system where even if a lot of banks were to come on a single platform none of them would have a competitive advantage over another one if they were on the same platform. So if like the three of us represent different banks and we are on the same platform then we basically lose all sorts of market differentiability and competitive advantages over each other. So that's kind of different about the Banglade blockchain isn't it? So there's not just one bank. That's true. So yes, you're absolutely right. But I think there's

nuance there that you didn't quite capture. So um they I don't think many of the banks want to all jump onto a bank blockchain, right? So there there there problems that banks face uh that blockchain can solve. So for example, um you've got a big multinational bank that goes in and buys a bunch of banks in another country, right? What's the fastest way to send money from one of the banks to the other banks? In some cases, it's using the same consumer-grade like wire transfer, right? That than than any other technology that the banks have inside because they can't they can't integrate.

So, if that bank instead had a unified blockchain that was just internal to the bank, right? They could do instantaneous settlement and clearing between all the banks that they have in the world, right? And and it's it's private. Nobody has to know what they're doing behind the scenes. But this private blockchain uh run just by that bank for that bank would enable all their bank branches to sync almost instantaneously which they can't do today. Right? So so that's one example where you know these private blockchains are are an interesting thing. I mean the other thing is of course like um this is something that could be incredibly disruptive to the banks. So they want to throw a bunch of money about on you know onto it learn as much as they can um and then uh you own

the technology if if at all possible. What would a what would a So I know we're very early in in in the uh in the process of of getting to a web payment standard. I think I think the first workshop was just a few months ago, right? Two two years ago actually. The first workshop was two years ago and then the working group the official working group uh interest group sorry was created three months later and then the first working group uh which actually creates technical standards started last o last September so works well underway right okay if you know we do arrive at at a standard um how long

do you think that can take like if HTM if HTML 5 took 12 years Um what in your opinion is the time frame needed in order to get all these banks and and and financial actors and uh browser manufacturers and all of the all the parties involved to come to a standard. So our our charter is for two years. If we don't get it done by two years, they will shut us down. Um so that kind of lights the fire under everybody to get this stuff um going. Um so so just to just to be clear um the W3C membership doesn't like this stuff to last multiple years. They want it they want it done

yesterday, right? So um and and there are certain things that are required to get it done as quickly as possible. One of them is to have the browser manufacturers's involvement. So making sure you've got Google Chrome and Firefox and uh Edge and uh Opera backing you, that's important. We have every single one of the major browser manufacturers in the web payments working group. They're engaged. Um the other thing of course is making sure that you have ecosystems that are going to deploy this stuff once they're there. Um you know Apple's involved in the group. They have Apple Pay. They have the iTunes store. You know there's a pretty large economic ecosystem there. Google kind of

has the same thing going on with Android Pay and you know um their you know payment mechanisms and their um you know browser tie-ins. Um so there's a forcing function here for the financial institutions the banks and you know uh major organizations like that. Um, and the forcing function is basically like uh if if Apple and Google adopt this technology before you do or if they start running with it and you don't, where do you think that's going to put you, right? Um, and I think you know the banks understand that and I don't think they they don't they want this stuff to succeed. They want payments to become um uh something where they can differentiate themselves um on like

online payments to be something that they can differentiate themselves on. They want online payments to be something that brings their customers in front of them because I mean the banks are like when you swipe your card, you don't you don't see your bank's brand image anywhere today, right? Whereas when you go to make an online payment, you might see a uh you know your payment page, say you know this payment being made uh uh via your uh USAA account or your Wells Fargo account or your Bank of New York account, right? So it's an advertising thing for the banks. they get to get in front of their get in front of their um uh their customers because they are I mean the banks are

there you know analyzing if you should be you know if you uh are committing fraudulent activity or not meaning like the banks are there to catch fraudulent activity. They're always there working behind the scenes to make sure that your money money is not being stolen from your account. So it would they would it would be nice at least they see it as it would be nice if our customers were reminded that we're looking out for them. Right. Okay. And with regards to the work that's been done so far what what are the sort of big areas that seem are there areas that seem to be converging or what what are people sort of coming towards or coagulating towards in terms of what the standard could look

like? Sure. So, you know, there are there are two uh kind of specifications right now. Like this changes from month to month. It's fairly it's it's fairly chaotic in the group right now because it's we're 3 months in and we're trying to figure out we're trying to get a first public working draft out by March of this year. Meaning like we're going to rough out what this thing looks like and put it out for public input by, you know, March, April, May of this year. Um, right now it looks like there are two uh web APIs and an HTTP API. So the web APIs are things that are going to be

implemented in the browser. Um, and there's a highle one and a low-level one. The highle one has to do with checkout flow. Like when you go to check out at a website that you've never been to, what do they almost always need from you? They almost always need a shipping address. um they almost always need some kind of payment uh token or something saying that you're going to you know pay for something. So um you know and there are other things they might want to collect like loyalty card coupons you know that kind of stuff. So uh one of them's looking like a highle checkout API. So you go to a site you click pay it says these are the items that you're buying. Like Chrome takes over and says these are the items that you're buying.

This is how much they cost. uh which shipping address you want to you do you want to use? I want to use my home shipping address. Um and then uh after that it says okay the total is like 20 $20 or 20 euro. Um and at that point you click pay and then the payment happens right so that's the highle flow. The lowle flow has more to do with just initiating a payment request. So, let's say that you're on a site. They don't really need to collect shipping address or any coupons or anything like that.

They're just like, "Give us five bucks." Right? So, that's, you know, you click the pay button. It says this site is is asking if you can pay them $5. Uh, you can pay with Visa, Mastercard, and Bitcoin. Which one do you want to pay with? And you, you know, click on Bitcoin or whatever. Um, and then you click pay and the payment's made, right? And the merchant has proof that the payment was made and all that kind of stuff. So right now that's what the browser experience looks like. There's a bunch of HTTP APIs um that uh that could be used for machine to machine communication. So let's say that you wanted to write some software that um made your monthly um electricity payments automatically,

right? So you could through like a program fetch an invoice from your electric company and then pay that invoice programmatically, right? No, you just have a an agent, a smart agent doing payments behind the scenes for you. Um, so that might run at your bank or it might be a piece of software that you write yourself, right? So that's what the HTTP look API looks like. Uh and of course we're trying to like um uh harmonize this stuff with the international financial networks like Swift and ISO 222. So there's a messaging component to it. So in general that's what the work looks like. It's like core messaging. What does the

payment protocol protocol look like over HTTP and then what does the payment uh protocol look like when executed through the web browser. Th this is fascinating because I I mean I work in e-commerce. So I've worked in e-commerce for the last almost a decade. Uh and you know checkout flow is just one of those things that people spend so much time working on the UX making sure it's optimized making sure people are going to you know not mess up on the fields or whatever. And with this, you're just a completely removing all those barriers and making it part of the browser and a unified experience that is essentially no longer the responsibility of the the

the company or the or the brand that has the e-commerce site, but the browser. So the so I think that's that's a good thing because browsers you know that that sort of interface software interface is probably going to be a lot cleaner and a lot better than uh something that you would find on a website. I mean people are going to get used to it. you know, they're always used to the same type same interface. But on the other hand, it does uh you know, there is a bit of marketing uh that's always involved in the checkout process. You know, like do you want to add this to your cart or like upselling things like that, right? There may be some um there may be some uh well obviously in terms of you know best practices that that will sort of shift

things, right? So that's what the low-level API is for, right? So we we are absolutely sensitive to sites not wanting to give up on the whole like checkout flow experience. So so you know to to address the first thing you said like many sites like it is not their expert like doing a good checkout flow that is not their expertise. It's a waste of time for them right because they they have a product and they want to sell it. They don't want to build the best checkout flow you know on the planet. Um, and honestly, they spend a ton of money doing it, like thousands upon thousands of dollars just doing a checkout flow. Um, ideally, so, so there are those companies, and then there are

other companies that really pride themselves on their checkout flow and how they upsell people and, you know, that that kind of stuff. And that's what the low-level payments API is for. Like, you can still control the entire checkout flow process if you want to. You don't have to use the highle checkout flow API. instead you can roll your own checkout flow and in the very last step the payment step that's when you invoke the the low-level API to make the payment. Um so we're very sensitive to I mean so there's so many different organizations that deal with value exchange like payments and every single one of them wants to do it in a slightly different way. So we're trying to accommodate all of them. We're trying not to be prescriptive about the way

that it's done. Um, and this is just all about giving people options, right? Um, there's nothing to stop a site from basically saying, "We're not going to use any of this web payments crap. We're just going to go and roll our own." That's totally fine. Like, they can do that if they want to. But if they want to save, you know, a lot of money, make the checkout experience smooth and um, and, you know, have the browser take over, that's totally a possibility as well. And another thing that we've talked about on the show before, especially with uh uh protocols like lightning network or or other uh initiatives like Stremium and there's been so much talk about this is the the idea of payment channels and being able to do microp payments and you know a payment channel

is essentially opening up a channel where you can send payments and in in exchange you'll receive something. It could be content, could be video content like streaming, could be Wi-Fi access, or it could be simply just being able to access web pages like uh going to your favorite website and uh not having a payw wall, but essentially just paying for every web page like 5 cents or something like that. Is this something that uh that this these payment APIs would allow for? Yes. Well, so right now in phase one, no, because we've got like two years to get this thing done, but it is definitely on the road map. Like remember that, you know, one of one of the first companies that um we founded uh had to deal with like streaming music over the network and

people paying um as they stream the music, right? So it's on demand payments, microp payments, um payment channels like all that kind of stuff. So we are definitely thinking about that. Um and we we even have technical solutions for that. uh the question is how long is it going to take us to u get that kind of stuff built into the standard. Now, with the HTTP API, there are ways that you can um hand a subscription off uh like a subscription token off to a website and then that website can pull payments as you use the site, right? So, it's kind of like metered access. So, yeah, absolutely.

That stuff's, you know, in in it's on the road map. Absolutely. And of course this doesn't address the issue of I mean because you're you're only you're wi with the standard what you're doing is you're making a standard way in which payments are received through a browser or some sort of client interface to the web. But you're not changing the way that we make payments. And of course one of the problems with say credit cards is especially high really high fees. you know, you're you're not addressing that issue and you would still have sort of those high fees if you were paying say, but we are. So, so here's the thing. The the web payments work is payment scheme agnostic, payment network agnostic, which means that if a merchant wants to

collect payment in Bitcoin, we let I mean that that's like, yeah, of course, you should be able to do that. If the merchant wants to be paid in like you know Litecoin or you know US dollars or they want an a payment to be made like the standard supports that so we are taking no position on what the best payment network is. We're just leveling the playing field. So if there is a better payment network that comes that that people start using that payment network can go online instantaneously. Right? That that's the goal. Like the payment network can go online instantaneously and as long as merchants say that they want to accept the payment, it will be

built into the browser experience, right? Without anyone having to go through a standardization process to like add Bitcoin or add Litecoin or add Ethereum, right? But you still need to have those mic those those payment networks that allow for cheap microp payments, for example. In this case, in this example, yeah, you wouldn't want to do microp payments with a credit card. that doesn't solve that problem. It you would still need to have that that payment network. Okay. So, before we wrap up here, we we're almost out of time. Uh can you tell us a bit about uh your company Digital Bazaar and what you guys are trying to solve? Sure. So, I mean our our company's our company's main purpose is to uh change the way people exchange value over the web, right?

meaning we want to see a dramatic um uh change in the way a dramatic positive change in the way people work and get uh compensated for that work, right? We want it to be a lot more flow-based. Um so the way that we do this um uh is we're one of the way core ways that we try to do this we're trying to build payments into the core architecture of the web because the web is an um is a highly connected global network. It's the biggest communication network that you know we've ever had. Um and as a result of that um uh if we build payments and value

exchange into that network um then we can drastically change the way that people are rewarded for the things that they do. So the way our company does that is um we focus uh on standardizing new technology to do payments. we take it to the through the standardization process and then our company provides turnkey solutions um for those standards. So if somebody wants to accept web payments that's super easy to do. Um if somebody wants to um accept uh uh new payment mechanisms uh they can just set up our software and it just works right. Um so that's um that's kind of the core of what our

company does. We go in there, we help standardize the technology and then we provide uh uh open uh standardized solutions uh for companies to purchase. It's a fairly simple business model, right? I mean, the more people that can use these open payment systems and open payment networks, the more people that are likely to license our software and use them. Okay. Well, many this is a really great conversation. Uh I mean personally I'm I've sort of always been fascinated with web standards and uh you know we didn't really get to talk about JSON LD which I I mean I hadn't really uh heard about before. I mean I heard about it but didn't really know what it was but I just realized like by through

researching your work what it was and and um thinking of perhaps implementing it in my emails that I send out. So it's it's so there's so there's lots of fascinating topics to talk about when when when uh when talking about web standards. Uh so thanks so much for coming on. Uh I do hope that uh I mean it is encouraging that uh you think that you say that this could take you know two two years to uh to to come to consensus around web payment standards. It is definitely encouraging and uh really hope that uh that that that goes according to plan and that we can come to some sort of a consensus about how payments should be made online. It is really uh one of those fundamental problems that uh I really think needs to

be tackled and needs to be addressed. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for uh having me today. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you for coming on. And to our listeners, thank you for listening. We are part of the LTB network where you can find a whole bunch of shows about Bitcoin cryptocurrencies blockchain and you can find that at let's talk bitcoin.com. Uh we release new episodes of Epicenter Bitcoin every Monday. You can find on your favorite podcasting app or Soundcloud. You can also watch the videos live. Sorry, not live, but you can watch the videos on YouTube at youtube.com/epicenterbitcoin. And of course, if you're a loyal listener, you can always leave us an iTunes review. If you do, send us an email at showepicenterbitcoin.com and we will send you one of these snazzy t-shirts.

And of course, you can always leave us a tip and our tipping address will be in the show description. Uh there's no web payment standards on how to do that. You just open it up with your uh you know, Bitcoin client and you can send us. It's that easy. So, thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week. [Music]