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Hey all,
> how about an XML standard, "Digital
> Gold Markup Language" perhaps.
Nice name :)
But I see a pattern arising, I think -- here's what I suspect will happen:
* we agree that we want a standard, and it must be simple, not like "that
other stuff" which is complex, probably because it's been designed by
people that are not nearly as smart as us...
* in an open discussion more and more complexity gets added:
- someone insists on two-step transactions to be able to make
cross-gold-system transfers as one whole; and now that we're
defining a standard we "should do it well".
- someone proposes a system that allows reservations, payment
tokens, fee precalculations, escrow support schemes, ...
- someone realises a feature that not all gold systems have, such
as a repudiability mechanism, a nifty transaction signature, a
currency such as the Euro, or a hashing technique such as SHA-1.
* the design evolves to one of the following:
- minimal, only defining the common denominator
- maximal, but not all gold systems implement it completely
- vague, with lots of optional parts and no clue when they are
needed and when they may be left out
- dynamic, with option negotiation between the gold systems
- any mixture of the above
* gold systems conform to the standard, but it's ambiguous (e.g.
syntax-only) just like "proper" standards such as X.509
and we're still just halfway.
I hope I'm wrong... and I'd love to actually be proven wrong... but this
is usually what happens to standards, and I doubt if gold is any simpler
than "those complex standards out there" if you do it well.
- If you do it halfway, is it going to be useful?
- If you could also just make some simple hacks based on a clear
description of a single gold system, would that not be simpler?
- is the number and variety of gold systems really so abundant?
Just being cautious,
Rick van Rein
DNS.vanrein.org -- Domain names payable in gold.
GOLD.vanrein.org -- Info about gold-based e-commerce + gold sale to the Dutch.
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