Topic: [IDEA] Recurring Payments (Read 1038 times)

great news, thanks for posting

Well guys, seems like the news ( http://thegenesisblock.com/significant-merchant-improvements-planned-for-bitcoin-v0-9/) brings excellent tidings for recurring payments!  When i read this today, i realized i should come here and post as in effect this thread can be marked "solved"!  :-)

The core devs are awesome and i cant wait to see this new messaging system start to be put to use...  Even if it relies on central signed certs for vendors to demonstrate some degree of legitimacy, its a good pragmatic, real world engineering decision which after some thought sounds like the right choice to me.  No vaporware- service providers already know how to buy and manage certificates for https, so this eases the learning curve to get solutions implemented.

Huzzah!

Keep us updated... I am interested in following your progress

Both very interesting links, Thanks.  I think the email basis of ReDonate makes it of limited viability as I get hundreds of mails a day - most legitimate (my job) and I really do NOT want to deal with emails from the services that pull/push my money each month like my cell phone, rent and utilities.  In the long term the public wouldn't do it.  To work it must be as good or better than what the banks now offer in terms of convenience.

That other link about micropayments led me to the contracts page over at bitcoin.it.  I'm gonna start studying it.... I avoided it last time I stumbled into it because it frankly just made no sense to me.

But I think I'm starting to catch on to the possibilities, and to be honest it kind of blows my mind.... 

A solution could look something like a combination of ReDonate and rapidly adjusted micropayments.

Indeed it does.  I hadn't noticed that.    To be honest i hadn't really paid attention to OpenTransaction because it made no sense with all this stuff about contracts and stock market functions.  But i see now i should have been paying attention!

Okay, now i'm curious about OpenTransactions.  Been reading around on Github and the wiki.  Checked out Monetas.  In the opentxs docs for the 'help' output I see "propose", and then looking at the api docs, found more details to establish payment plans.  Looks awesome.

So...  I had this idea a few days ago when I was struggling with how to make vendor requested recurring payments work, and I had this idea of wallets who talk to each other P2P separately from the blockchain p2p functionality.  Like two p2p networks meshed on top of each other.  Mashup of bitcion with a skype like (without the central MS servers) RPC back channel.  Perhaps a kind pf p2p file system like Kademlia or similar to handle off blockchain agreements between clients.  Reason being the set of nodes one would want to talk to for blockchain activity (aside from already being built) is not going to be the set of nodes you might want to conduct transaction contracts with.  Indeed it would seem dangerous for the two sets to be linked in any way at all.

Studying the OpenTransactions project though, i gotta say i have no idea what it is.  Is it anything like my above idea and did you seriously beat me to the punch?

FYI, Open-Transactions does recurring payments,

Thanks for the feedback

I'm not sure there's a place in the ecosystem for an external system to do this as it kind of goes against the overal philosophy of democratizing banking and all of the services and features it offers.....  Doncha think?

That said, I definitely think a solution is needed.  My preference is that a protocol be established whereby two clients (one could be a business using a commerce service like Bitpay or something) have the capability of establishing a trusted relationship.  Two kinds possible: 

A:  A fixed recurring payment that you establish for sending on a schedule (I do this with my rent for example). 

Difficulty low as it's a wallet side feature, though it would be handy if my landlord could send me a request which contains the amount, deposit address, frequency cycle, etc..  Wallets would need UI features for managing these recurring payments.

B:  A variable recurring "pull" payment whereby a service deducts from your account each month what you owe.  (I do this with my mobile phone, car loan, etc..  I trust these parties but also have recourse with my bank if I ever think they took too much.) 
  (For the record, I know some are suspicious of this banking arrangement, but I LOVE this feature because I really don't have the patience to deal with common trusted invoices each month.  I just want them paid as long as the money deducted fits within "normal" bounds and matches the invoices which I review periodically to make sure they're fair.  Mortgage, rent, car payment, cell phone bill, and utilities are all prime targets for this arrangement, and conventional banking will always exist if there's no equivalent solution in crypto currencies.)

Difficulty to accomplish:  My brain boggles.  I've poured some thought into it and can imagine a new out of bandwidth (meaning not in the blockchain) protocol for wallets to establish and manage these kind of long term relationships with each other....  But to prevent wallets from all doing it differently a standard should be developed which sounds like a sizeable research and dev project.  But I think it's possible to do in a decentralized whay that exists separately from the blockchain, and which isn't through 3rd party services who would increase transactional friction with fees.

Groan, maybe a 3rd party service is the best way.    I don't have any hopes that this would be developed in the near future as the bitcoin project has some bigger fish to fry first.  (Like sorting out floating / fair transaction fee reckoning, zerocoin or similar mixing, blockchain pruning, increasing transaction per second scalability, etc...)   I guess a wallet developer could take on the design challenge.  I've searched several times in the past and haven't found anyone working on this yet.

But I'd love the feature!

I am bouncing a few ideas around and wanted to get some market feedback from the community.

Please let me know if you would be interested in a service that allows you to create a recurring payment to or be requested from another user.

The idea is from my view pretty straight forward.

You have a service that people subscribe to and want to be paid in bitcoin or other alt-coin on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.