There was a brief discussion yesterday on irc about using webmentions for payments. It sounds like there are already some ideas out there (including rel payments), but it got me thinking so wanted to write down my thoughts.
Let's say a friend paid for a pizza last night, and I wanted to chip in $5 but had no cash on me. The next day, I go to my website and write a post. Like all posts it's marked up with microformats, but this one also contains: <data class="p-debit" value="5.00">$5 for pizza</data>
Now to inform my friend that I have made this payment, I need to also person tag them in the post so that they receive a webmention. (I should also set a u-uid on the post so that I can track it, and to keep this post private I should either sufficiently obfuscate the permalink or use some other form of private webmention... but that's another discussion).
To participate in this transaction, my friend also needs to implement some indieweb features. Firstly they need to be able to receive home page webmentions. Upon verification of the webmention, they would need to check for the debit (or credit) property in my post. When found, their software would need to allow them to create a new reply post, linking to the original, and containing a matching credit property also with value="5.00".
Of course they don't have to accept the payment, in which case they don't write the reply post. I could specify a time frame in which the payment needs to be accepted, after which I delete my post if a webmention hasn't been received that references it. However assuming it is accepted, I would verify the webmention and make sure the two values of the transaction match. Both parties can do this, and we haven't had to advertise the urls involved to anyone else.
My debit or credit to this particular friend is just the sum of verified transactions that match their domain. We could each cache our balance to know who's turn it is to buy pizza, if we ever disagreed on the number it would just be a matter of revisiting each of the linked urls containing our payments.
I've just released the latest version of SimplePie, 1.4.1.
The main indieweb related change in this release is PubSubHubbub support for microformat feeds. They're a bit different from XML feeds in that the hub links can be found in the body of the html or in the headers. Both types of discovery are now supported.
Other new microformat features include: u-uid and dt-deleted support, and categories now supply extra markup for h-cards to identify person tags.
part 2.
Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 Test 13 Test 14 Test 15 Test 16 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 21
Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 Test 13 Test 14 Test 15 Test 16 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 21
Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 Test 13 Test 14 Test 15 Test 16 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 21
credmentions: a distributed ledger for the #indieweb
Let's say a friend paid for a pizza last night, and I wanted to chip in $5 but had no cash on me. The next day, I go to my website and write a post. Like all posts it's marked up with microformats, but this one also contains: <data class="p-debit" value="5.00">$5 for pizza</data>
Now to inform my friend that I have made this payment, I need to also person tag them in the post so that they receive a webmention. (I should also set a u-uid on the post so that I can track it, and to keep this post private I should either sufficiently obfuscate the permalink or use some other form of private webmention... but that's another discussion).
To participate in this transaction, my friend also needs to implement some indieweb features. Firstly they need to be able to receive home page webmentions. Upon verification of the webmention, they would need to check for the debit (or credit) property in my post. When found, their software would need to allow them to create a new reply post, linking to the original, and containing a matching credit property also with value="5.00".
Of course they don't have to accept the payment, in which case they don't write the reply post. I could specify a time frame in which the payment needs to be accepted, after which I delete my post if a webmention hasn't been received that references it. However assuming it is accepted, I would verify the webmention and make sure the two values of the transaction match. Both parties can do this, and we haven't had to advertise the urls involved to anyone else.
My debit or credit to this particular friend is just the sum of verified transactions that match their domain. We could each cache our balance to know who's turn it is to buy pizza, if we ever disagreed on the number it would just be a matter of revisiting each of the linked urls containing our payments.
SimplePie 1.4.1 released
The main indieweb related change in this release is PubSubHubbub support for microformat feeds. They're a bit different from XML feeds in that the hub links can be found in the body of the html or in the headers. Both types of discovery are now supported.
Other new microformat features include: u-uid and dt-deleted support, and categories now supply extra markup for h-cards to identify person tags.