At 07:21 PM 10/2/01, Chuck Wade wrote: >Folks, > >A few high-level comments on p-cards to help structure this >discussion a bit.
Chuck - this was a great post. It is an interesting question how the goals and objectives of P-cards could possibly be met in some future P2P, reputation-based network. (Disclaimer:) The reason I'm focused on P2P, serverless commerce is out of the personal belief that too many people are rejecting portal models. I think this fraction of consumers and small businesses is high, and rising. They are now very clueful of schemes that give the host access to too much information. Or allow the host to extract fees, or allow the host to limit choices in purchasing and selling. The point I'm trying to make is, if you want a globally adopted mode of e-business then, it has to satisfy the needs and the wishes of the whole market. You can't get broad adoption by asking people to give up real advantages and freedoms that they already enjoy with currency and paper checks. I believe there will be some kind of a hand-held thing, having quite remarkably strong capabilities for authentication, and having also, considerable accounting and business process capabilities. It isn't that everybody is going to strongly identify themselves, all the time, at all. Rather, they will have the *ability* to identify themselves quite powerfully, *when they want to*. Such as when checking in at the airport, making big purchases on credit, etc. What I think is going to emerge is that individuals will issue signed promises to pay, perhaps even minting digital cash which will be negotiable. In any case, there will be a framework for knowing who you're dealing with quite reliably, without having it operated by Microsoft or the US government. There will be quite an orderly, routine after-the-fact settlement cycle, also mostly outside any bank or regulatory scheme. The data exchanged between the two parties to any transaction will be much deeper than in the past. The data visible to anybody *else* in the universe will be much less than today, or at any point in history since the emergence of commercial banking. Paradoxically this will result in greater law enforcement capabilities not less, and it will result in much less crime and fraud than today's system controlled by central hosts. There won't be positive money. Instead there will be negative money. I will admit this sounds far fetched. http://www.arapxml.net/arapcloud.htm in which payables find their way to be magically matched and netted with receivables, in the network. This AR/AP vision depends on sellers extending credit to customers. Sellers need the independent means to check the creditworthiness of customers. This will come from traditional credit agencies only as a last resort; reputation metrics instead will need to come from webs of trust, and from ledger reputation metrics of the AR/AP fabric itself. In other words, the customer might provide various financial ratios and increasingly detailed views of his transactions history. Having rights to those abstract facts the seller can confirm those facts by contacting the past trading partners, in abstract ways in which identities for example, may be masked by encryption. Within this wild and futuristic scheme, the limitations and constraints required for internal control by corporate purchasing would be part of the empirical reputation metrics available to the seller, or should I say, imposed on the seller. In other words, the mechanism by which the seller decides to extend credit is by reference to the buyer's reputation metrics. You would include along with a buyers' reputation metrics, FICO scores, interest rates, etc., constraints which allow *only* specific goods and services from *specific* vendors. The buyer would still have his own distinct identity with his usual creditworthiness, but would get this nym from the company. The new nym would have dumb, limited purchasing abilities. If the employee got fed up with them, he would switch to his own real self or some other nym having real reputation. You can see some of these concepts such as multiple nyms defined in the MeT spec., the thing really has a lot of potentials, I think, Todd
