7 ms·

Payments on the Solid Framework

130 points by jmunsch 8y ago

Renaud 8y ago
The solid infrastructure looks promising to me. Based on the other submission today on Solid[1], there are varying opinions on whether it will take off and really be able to challenge the big social media. However, I think we _need to want_ this to succeed, even if there are other ideas of what decentralised architectures should look like. It may not be the best system to everyone, but it has some clout with Tim Berners-Lee behind it and its architecture and capabilities can -and will- evolve. It looks to me like our best chance to start 'disrupting' the current status-quo, even if it flies under the radar for a while. I can imagine an Instagram-like app that would let me import a take-out archive from my Instagram account and just let me continue where I left off. Maybe I would need to rebuild a user-base, but that's OK, there would be new people on that platform and and more control over what I want to see, rather than some ad-optimized algorithm deciding for me. A payment systems built on top could allow direct monetisation for content-creators without having to go through a 3rd party that enforces arbitrary rules over what content gets and doesn't get monetized. [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100895
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Disruption is driven by need though. Uber succeeded because traditional cab companies suck. I can’t remember when people weren’t complaining about cabs, even before the internet, and Uber came and removed almost all of the annoyances. Sure they were bad for labour, but for the customers it made sense. I’ve never seen anyone complain about Instagram or visa. How can you disrupt services that people love? I mean, it should be obvious by now that almost nobody cares about privacy.
  - codingdave 8y ago
    > I’ve never seen anyone complain about Instagram or visa. Then you are not listening to everyone. According to some, Instagram is the most toxic site out there, and Visa leeches fees from their customers. I'm not necessarily in those camps, but I certainly have heard the criticisms. Industries that are ready to disrupt have loyal followings that they think everyone loves them, when in reality much of society would be just as happy to see them fade. The web as a whole is reaching that point. Whether you dislike the privacy issues, the money-driven nature of startups, the demographic who lives online without engaging with the world, or any other reason... the web is not universally loved, despite the many people who still think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe it is time for some changes.
  - mhotchen 8y ago
    Heh we obviously have very different groups of friends. Everyone I know complains about Insta and existing payment methods all the time. On top of the people complaining there are those the market hasn't appealed to yet. I'm a very social person but I'm not on any social networks. My mum is (wisely) a bit scared of sharing her data on the internet and also using the internet in general. I've taught her some of the basics so she can eg. receive photos from my by email but she doesn't want to use social networks because she doesn't trust them. I feel the same way. She has plenty of friends she could be keeping in contact with regularly too. I've seen people wishing they had a Solid-like concept for years, asking for ownership of their data with fine-grained control over who/what gets access to it. And I think that those who haven't wished for this (eg. the general population) will see the benefits once they actually try to use it. Whether Solid can pull this off is another question but I think this is an area that is driven by demand and it's only through ignorance that people aren't generally asking for this.
  - fastball 8y ago
    Literally everyone that has interacted with the financial sector has complained about the financial sector at some point. Person-to-person settlement is a stepping stone on the way to a better financial/banking system.
    - eksemplar 8y ago
      We already have person-to-person payment apps that work instantly and feeless though, at least in my country we do. They were made by banks.
  - j45 8y ago
    This example doesn't include people who never took cabs but started using Uber because it was easier. Need isn't the only thing that drives disruption or innovation.
- natural219 8y ago
  There's just a ton of better projects out there solving this problem with a much higher focus on architectural clarity, running code, competing seriously with major platforms, etc. https://decentralizedweb.net/ https://decentralizedweb.net/
  - carapace 8y ago
    "TALK: Solid: empowering people through choice" Speakers: Tim Berners-Lee, Ruben Verborgh https://decentralizedweb.net/videos/talk-solid-empowering-people-through-choice/ https://decentralizedweb.net/videos/talk-solid-empowering-pe...
ryanjshaw 8y ago
Okay I'll bite. I've worked in both retail and corporate banking for over a decade. I've been responsible for software that processes large payments and receipts daily. I've cloned a few cryptocurrencies for fun and have a pretty good understanding of them. I cannot understand anything on this entire site. Does anybody know what this is all about?
- Bogdanp 8y ago
  I feel the same way. I've read through the whole thing and it's essentially a hand-wavy marketing pitch without any concrete details. At one point they link to a repo containing some node code (2-year-old code, mind you), but that didn't exactly help elucidate things for me.
- jmunsch 8y ago
  From what I understood it uses RDF triples, linked data, and uses an ontology, that is compatible with Solid aka linking a "Person" to a "Wallet" and actions to a transaction/service/resource [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax) [2]: https://docs.solidpay.org/appendix-a-sample-data https://docs.solidpay.org/appendix-a-sample-data
- polyomino 8y ago
  From what I gather, they're trying to make coinbase, but on top of ipfs.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Is this group associated with Coinbase? Did they get permission to use the name?
    - ryanmarsh 8y ago
      The first time I saw the word coinbase was in an explanation of the bitcoin source code and how bitcoin works. I do believe it precedes Coinbase.
    - 8y ago
simonmorley 8y ago
No https redirect on signup or login. That worries me.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Where are you seeing a signup/login? I'm only seeing the documentation (maybe one of my plugins is blocking something?).
simonmorley 8y ago
Oh and ‘add your producst’. I’m out.
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
It is pretty interesting and kinda disappointing to see renowned tech luminaries hopping on the hype train left and right.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Or maybe there's something to it, and it's still being worked on? I have no opinion either way on Solid (yet), but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical considering they're still rolling it out and it's a work in progress. When I read the OP link above, and the other submission today, I just see an early-stage project that is still being actively developed, no different to thousands of other projects posted on HN. I do think their marketing/buzzword approach to be a bit "thick", but that could also be said about 90% of HN-loved products/services.
  - stefan_ 8y ago
    Actually, the revolution is still solidly in the white paper stage: https://github.com/solidpayorg/solidpay/blob/master/package.json https://github.com/solidpayorg/solidpay/blob/master/package....
  - nulbyte 8y ago
    > ...but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical... I think there are very good reasons for the critical commentary. Tim Berners-Lee made the comment recently that it took 15 years for us to get "here," where here seems to be a bunch of handwavey marketing fluff and broken demos. I am going to take what he says and believe he meant that the broken demos were built upon 15 years of prior work on bits and pieces that no one put together until recently; at least that is slightly more palatable. But Solid Pay suffers even more from the handwavey marketing fluff, because its handwavey marketing fluff relies on Solid's handwavey marketing fluff. > Solid builds on 30 years of Web research and development. It has a cutting edge semantic layer with proven scalability... Since when has Solid proven its scalability? The demos don't even work. Even if it overcomes the infirm state of Solid, it then suffers from the apparent fact that while Solid Pay is intended to interact with the existing monetary infrastructure, no one working on Solid Pay seems to understand that infrastructure. In Solid Pay, a Credit increases your balance; but everywhere else, a credit decreases it. This sounds simple, but if you mess up simple, I fear for the complicated bits will be worse. There are real problems here, and we can't just hope they go away; we must be critical of them or else we risk dealing with them for quite some time should these systems actually materialize.
sunseb 8y ago
The web 1.0 was a success because it was simple. I don’t understand anything about Solid.
- GordonS 8y ago
  You probably would if the Solid websites actually explained anything about how it works, rather than being filled with ridiculous marketing speak. I'm honestly really disappointed that TBL is obviously OK with this.
jarym 8y ago
2nd solid post today and despite being familiar with the concepts I don’t understand any of the detail. Marketing spiel is fine but somewhere concrete details need to be provided without the BS. Very disappointing that Tim Berners-Lee would be associated with something so poorly expressed.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Maybe by the third article, someone will tell us what it is.
- naasking 8y ago
  A better overview with some sample apps: https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    The signup link is a 404, and most apps haven't had commits for years. Where is the current documentation?
- j45 8y ago
  In the case of SOLID, I'd probably cut the guy who started the web some more slack than a cursory glance at the work and determine if I can't immediately understand it - there can't be any understanding or value in it. Some things that take years to design and put together, might take a while for all of us to catch up to. I hope examples continue to come out, but more importantly, those who develop can spend some time to hack with it. Maybe some brains are seeing this that are primarily wired to work and understand through a lens of front end, or back-end development, where but Tim Berner-Lees like lots of other devs here is used to end-to-end. It seemed pretty simple to me, and pretty simple to follow along with. If we're looking for something shiny, the web wasn't shiny on day 1.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Every single user story on that website uses concepts that make absolutely no sense to me. And I’m a power user. If you can’t make it understandable to me. I just don’t believe that you’ll ever get anyone to use it.
datavirtue 8y ago
https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu
gilbertmpanga12 8y ago
Read about Solid yesterday and was super fascinated by the idea of Pods and since am solving a payment solution, I saw it would be a kickass solution for payments.Now solidPay is out but sadly it's confusing, how do I begin implementing it
- stephengillie 8y ago
  You get some Bitcoin and send it to a URL, then it will be in your wallet, or so we hope. Some parts are incomplete. This service isn't ready. From the Paywall page: > Process This is a work in progress
z3t4 8y ago
One of the basic ideas of a ledger is that once a transaction has been added, it can not be removed or changed.

130 points by jmunsch 8y ago

The solid infrastructure looks promising to me. Based on the other submission today on Solid[1], there are varying opinions on whether it will take off and really be able to challenge the big social media. However, I think we _need to want_ this to succeed, even if there are other ideas of what decentralised architectures should look like. It may not be the best system to everyone, but it has some clout with Tim Berners-Lee behind it and its architecture and capabilities can -and will- evolve. It looks to me like our best chance to start 'disrupting' the current status-quo, even if it flies under the radar for a while. I can imagine an Instagram-like app that would let me import a take-out archive from my Instagram account and just let me continue where I left off. Maybe I would need to rebuild a user-base, but that's OK, there would be new people on that platform and and more control over what I want to see, rather than some ad-optimized algorithm deciding for me. A payment systems built on top could allow direct monetisation for content-creators without having to go through a 3rd party that enforces arbitrary rules over what content gets and doesn't get monetized. [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100895

eksemplar 8y ago
Disruption is driven by need though. Uber succeeded because traditional cab companies suck. I can’t remember when people weren’t complaining about cabs, even before the internet, and Uber came and removed almost all of the annoyances. Sure they were bad for labour, but for the customers it made sense. I’ve never seen anyone complain about Instagram or visa. How can you disrupt services that people love? I mean, it should be obvious by now that almost nobody cares about privacy.
- codingdave 8y ago
  > I’ve never seen anyone complain about Instagram or visa. Then you are not listening to everyone. According to some, Instagram is the most toxic site out there, and Visa leeches fees from their customers. I'm not necessarily in those camps, but I certainly have heard the criticisms. Industries that are ready to disrupt have loyal followings that they think everyone loves them, when in reality much of society would be just as happy to see them fade. The web as a whole is reaching that point. Whether you dislike the privacy issues, the money-driven nature of startups, the demographic who lives online without engaging with the world, or any other reason... the web is not universally loved, despite the many people who still think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe it is time for some changes.
- mhotchen 8y ago
  Heh we obviously have very different groups of friends. Everyone I know complains about Insta and existing payment methods all the time. On top of the people complaining there are those the market hasn't appealed to yet. I'm a very social person but I'm not on any social networks. My mum is (wisely) a bit scared of sharing her data on the internet and also using the internet in general. I've taught her some of the basics so she can eg. receive photos from my by email but she doesn't want to use social networks because she doesn't trust them. I feel the same way. She has plenty of friends she could be keeping in contact with regularly too. I've seen people wishing they had a Solid-like concept for years, asking for ownership of their data with fine-grained control over who/what gets access to it. And I think that those who haven't wished for this (eg. the general population) will see the benefits once they actually try to use it. Whether Solid can pull this off is another question but I think this is an area that is driven by demand and it's only through ignorance that people aren't generally asking for this.
- fastball 8y ago
  Literally everyone that has interacted with the financial sector has complained about the financial sector at some point. Person-to-person settlement is a stepping stone on the way to a better financial/banking system.
  - eksemplar 8y ago
    We already have person-to-person payment apps that work instantly and feeless though, at least in my country we do. They were made by banks.
- j45 8y ago
  This example doesn't include people who never took cabs but started using Uber because it was easier. Need isn't the only thing that drives disruption or innovation.
natural219 8y ago
There's just a ton of better projects out there solving this problem with a much higher focus on architectural clarity, running code, competing seriously with major platforms, etc. https://decentralizedweb.net/ https://decentralizedweb.net/
- carapace 8y ago
  "TALK: Solid: empowering people through choice" Speakers: Tim Berners-Lee, Ruben Verborgh https://decentralizedweb.net/videos/talk-solid-empowering-people-through-choice/ https://decentralizedweb.net/videos/talk-solid-empowering-pe...

ryanjshaw 8y ago

Okay I'll bite. I've worked in both retail and corporate banking for over a decade. I've been responsible for software that processes large payments and receipts daily. I've cloned a few cryptocurrencies for fun and have a pretty good understanding of them. I cannot understand anything on this entire site. Does anybody know what this is all about?

Bogdanp 8y ago
I feel the same way. I've read through the whole thing and it's essentially a hand-wavy marketing pitch without any concrete details. At one point they link to a repo containing some node code (2-year-old code, mind you), but that didn't exactly help elucidate things for me.
jmunsch 8y ago
From what I understood it uses RDF triples, linked data, and uses an ontology, that is compatible with Solid aka linking a "Person" to a "Wallet" and actions to a transaction/service/resource [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax) [2]: https://docs.solidpay.org/appendix-a-sample-data https://docs.solidpay.org/appendix-a-sample-data
polyomino 8y ago
From what I gather, they're trying to make coinbase, but on top of ipfs.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Is this group associated with Coinbase? Did they get permission to use the name?
  - ryanmarsh 8y ago
    The first time I saw the word coinbase was in an explanation of the bitcoin source code and how bitcoin works. I do believe it precedes Coinbase.
  - 8y ago

simonmorley 8y ago

No https redirect on signup or login. That worries me.

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Where are you seeing a signup/login? I'm only seeing the documentation (maybe one of my plugins is blocking something?).

simonmorley 8y ago

Oh and ‘add your producst’. I’m out.

etaioinshrdlu 8y ago

It is pretty interesting and kinda disappointing to see renowned tech luminaries hopping on the hype train left and right.

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Or maybe there's something to it, and it's still being worked on? I have no opinion either way on Solid (yet), but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical considering they're still rolling it out and it's a work in progress. When I read the OP link above, and the other submission today, I just see an early-stage project that is still being actively developed, no different to thousands of other projects posted on HN. I do think their marketing/buzzword approach to be a bit "thick", but that could also be said about 90% of HN-loved products/services.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Actually, the revolution is still solidly in the white paper stage: https://github.com/solidpayorg/solidpay/blob/master/package.json https://github.com/solidpayorg/solidpay/blob/master/package....
- nulbyte 8y ago
  > ...but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical... I think there are very good reasons for the critical commentary. Tim Berners-Lee made the comment recently that it took 15 years for us to get "here," where here seems to be a bunch of handwavey marketing fluff and broken demos. I am going to take what he says and believe he meant that the broken demos were built upon 15 years of prior work on bits and pieces that no one put together until recently; at least that is slightly more palatable. But Solid Pay suffers even more from the handwavey marketing fluff, because its handwavey marketing fluff relies on Solid's handwavey marketing fluff. > Solid builds on 30 years of Web research and development. It has a cutting edge semantic layer with proven scalability... Since when has Solid proven its scalability? The demos don't even work. Even if it overcomes the infirm state of Solid, it then suffers from the apparent fact that while Solid Pay is intended to interact with the existing monetary infrastructure, no one working on Solid Pay seems to understand that infrastructure. In Solid Pay, a Credit increases your balance; but everywhere else, a credit decreases it. This sounds simple, but if you mess up simple, I fear for the complicated bits will be worse. There are real problems here, and we can't just hope they go away; we must be critical of them or else we risk dealing with them for quite some time should these systems actually materialize.

sunseb 8y ago

The web 1.0 was a success because it was simple. I don’t understand anything about Solid.

GordonS 8y ago
You probably would if the Solid websites actually explained anything about how it works, rather than being filled with ridiculous marketing speak. I'm honestly really disappointed that TBL is obviously OK with this.

jarym 8y ago

2nd solid post today and despite being familiar with the concepts I don’t understand any of the detail. Marketing spiel is fine but somewhere concrete details need to be provided without the BS. Very disappointing that Tim Berners-Lee would be associated with something so poorly expressed.

eksemplar 8y ago
Maybe by the third article, someone will tell us what it is.
naasking 8y ago
A better overview with some sample apps: https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD
- stephengillie 8y ago
  The signup link is a 404, and most apps haven't had commits for years. Where is the current documentation?
j45 8y ago
In the case of SOLID, I'd probably cut the guy who started the web some more slack than a cursory glance at the work and determine if I can't immediately understand it - there can't be any understanding or value in it. Some things that take years to design and put together, might take a while for all of us to catch up to. I hope examples continue to come out, but more importantly, those who develop can spend some time to hack with it. Maybe some brains are seeing this that are primarily wired to work and understand through a lens of front end, or back-end development, where but Tim Berner-Lees like lots of other devs here is used to end-to-end. It seemed pretty simple to me, and pretty simple to follow along with. If we're looking for something shiny, the web wasn't shiny on day 1.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Every single user story on that website uses concepts that make absolutely no sense to me. And I’m a power user. If you can’t make it understandable to me. I just don’t believe that you’ll ever get anyone to use it.

datavirtue 8y ago

https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu

gilbertmpanga12 8y ago

Read about Solid yesterday and was super fascinated by the idea of Pods and since am solving a payment solution, I saw it would be a kickass solution for payments.Now solidPay is out but sadly it's confusing, how do I begin implementing it

stephengillie 8y ago
You get some Bitcoin and send it to a URL, then it will be in your wallet, or so we hope. Some parts are incomplete. This service isn't ready. From the Paywall page: > Process This is a work in progress

z3t4 8y ago

One of the basic ideas of a ledger is that once a transaction has been added, it can not be removed or changed.