On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 4:00 PM, Peter Harpending
<pe...@harpending.org> wrote:
On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 03:48:54PM -0400, Stephen Michel wrote:
To me, it seems like arrears is the clear superior option for MVP.
Holding
funds adds significant legal complexity for what seems like a small
benefit
-- and it's something that we could transition to later anyway.
Imagine we're doing arrears, because that's the easier way. Then,
because we
think the benefits of holding are worth it, we invest in a lawyer
and figure
out a legal way to do it. It should be relatively easy to modify the
existing system to simply pay into the arrears system from the bank
account
where we're holding funds instead of from a patron's own credit
card.
So we want to offer gift cards? Same deal, or we can partner with a
bank
that already offers something like that (similar to
http://www.walmart.com/c/kp/visa-gift-cards -- but more morally
palatable
than walmart :P).
The only disadvantage I can see with arrears that absolutely could
not be
worked around would be if no payment processor met our moral
standards.
Except -- imagine in a few years when snowdrift.coop has become
wildly
successful: maybe now it's time to start our own ethical payment
processor
(or gnu taler, or ethereum/maidsafe as discussed elsewhere, is up
and
running and stable/trusted).
BOTTOM LINE: When comparing a thing that we know will work for us
on launch
to a thing that needs further exploration, I need to pick the
former.
This might be a case of "complicated for programmers" v. "complicated
and
expensive for lawyers". In that case, I would vote for the option
that makes
things complicated for the programmers, because it's much easier and
less
expensive.
BOTTOM LINE: When comparing a thing that we know will work for us on
launch
to a thing that needs further exploration, I need to pick the
former.
All of these options need further exploration. None of them are very
easy.
I might be wrong, but to me it seems like "complicated for programmers"
is a given in either scenario, as either way we'll need to interface
with some kind of external API, whether it be arrears with Stripe or
credit cards (receiving funds deposited into an account).
I actually have no idea how to actually go about arranging a
transaction between
any of these third-party payment systems, especially from a Haskell
program.
It seems like the issue is figuring out how to call their API from
Haskell. If the Stripe people are half as helpful as Aaron seems to
think they will be, I am not terribly worried about that. It'll be
challenge for sure, but not orders of magnitude larger than holding
funds, unless I'm missing something major.
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