... and none of those are open, patent and royalty-free Web standards. You could argue that Bitcoin is such a beast, but it is more of a financial protocol and currency wrapped into one. PaySwarm will eventually support Bitcoin as a currency (along with hundreds of other currencies), so there is no real conflict there. Sorry, but this is Slashdot. If you're going to link to XKCD, you should at least make sure that what you're linking to is a good analogy. :P

Not true: http://payswarm.com/ Also: http://blog.meritora.com/

PaySwarm is currency agnostic, so it can support all national currencies, as well as alternative currencies like Bitcoin and Ven. We don't have Bitcoin support in there yet, but it's on the roadmap and we hope to sooner than later. There are regulatory issues that we have to work through. More here: http://blog.meritora.com/

We are building the technology out in the open, transparently. Anyone can join the group. There are no fees, there are no prerequisites for joining. You can read the minutes from every one of the design meetings, and even listen to the audio here (we record everything): http://payswarm.com/minutes/

Here's an example of one such meeting: https://payswarm.com/minutes/2012-07-10/

Why design the financial system in this way? We need to show people that, unlike the way our current financial system is developed and run (behind closed doors), that we're taking a radically new approach to building the basis of the financial network that we hope all of humanity will use. This financial network is open and decentralized, like the Web.

If this interests you, I urge you to join and lurk (or preferably, participate): http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/

PaySwarm, which is part of the Web Payments work at the W3C, supports micro-transactions. All transactions in the system are accurate up to 0.0000000001 of a fraction of the currency specified. See this for more details: http://blog.meritora.com/

It could count as an in-app payment and I have no idea if the in-app purchase patent you're talking about applies, nor am I going to go take a look at it:

http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Treble_damages

Our experience in this area, after looking at lots of patents, is that they tend to be badly written and/or easily easily worked around. We did file provisional patents for the technology in 2004 to establish prior art for the express purpose of ensuring that nobody else could patent the technology and that we could offer it patent and royalty-free in a Web standard.

The folks working on the PaySwarm stuff believe in data portability, so you own your private data and can take it with you when you leave the system. That's a design goal. As far as access to your hard drive, that's a bit vague - does writing a cookie to your hard drive count? Same with access to the network, vague. Care to elaborate? There are a number of open source implementations of clients now: https://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm.js/ https://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-wordpress/ Since it's an open, patent and royalty-free spec, there will be open source implementations of a PaySwarm Authority (the things that process payments and move money around in the network) in time.

PaySwarm is currency agnostic and is designed to support both national currencies and alternative currencies like Bitcoin and Ven.

The mozPay() API is built so that Mozilla has a whitelist of organizations that are allowed to be vendors. You have to get permission from Mozilla to get on that list, and that's not very Webby. That said, Mozilla will be the first to admit that this isn't ideal and that they want to move toward a more decentralized solution. They designed it this way because decentralized payments is a really hard problem and they didn't have time to solve it and launch FirefoxOS at the same time. Luckily, we (Digital Bazaar and other folks at the W3C) have been working on decentralized payments for years and have a working solution that we're coordinating with Mozilla on trying to find a way to get it integrated with the mozPay() API.

Hi, I'm the chair of the Web Payments group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Just pointing out that the Mozilla mozPay() API is part of a greater push in the standards community to make payments a core part of the Webs architecture. This includes buying/selling digital goods, donations, crowd-funding, all the way to equity and loan-based crowd-financing for start-ups. Note that the mozPay() API is centralized, which even folks at Mozilla will tell you is not ideal. The eventual goal is to create a decentralized payment architecture that is designed for the Web from day one. We plan to put these advanced financial tools into the hands of all Web developers so that anyone with a website or blog has access to this open financial network.

You can read more about the PaySwarm standardization work here, which is mentioned at the end of the Mozilla mozPay() blog post: https://payswarm.com/

The first commercial implementation of these specifications launched three days ago: http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

If you're interested in following what's going on, join the Web Payments group at W3C: http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/

Hi, I'm Manu Sporny - the person that authored that article. You ask good questions, but your answers to your own questions do not come from knowledge or understanding of how W3C and IETF work. You seem jaded by the world, let me try and convince you that things are not as awful as you believe them to be. Let me start by answering your most important question:

Since when has anyone been able to make a change to the status quo?

Many people do this at W3C, IETF, WHATWG and many other online communities every day. They help make the world a better place. They lead the Web to its full potential. At W3C, they're called Invited Experts and they are just like you and me. They don't come from large companies or people with deep pockets, they do amazing work and are then asked to participate in standards work at no cost to them.

You are often asked to join W3C because you have a particular expertise in an area. I am an Invited Expert - I've never paid a dime to W3C, but hope to some day because the work they do is so important. In my case, I was working on Microformats, music markup, online payments and structured data in HTML. I approached the RDFa Working Group chair at the time and asked to be a part of the discussion at W3C about RDFa. The chair of the RDFa Working Group at that time was Ben Adida, and he said that he would love to have the Microformats community's input. I was invited to join. I was required to pay absolutely nothing. I've never had to pay anything to W3C and this is because they value expert input on their standards.

It currently costs $0 to join the HTML Working Group at W3C. You could easily have an effect on HTML5 if you would put in the time to read the spec and comment on it. W3C is legally obligated to respond to you - anyone can make a difference, you just have to try. Here's how you can do it: become an expert in something Web related - invent something new or do lots of implementations and gain more knowledge than your peers. Work hard. When I say "Work Hard", I mean really, really hard. You have to write specs, you have to do implementations, you have to be familiar with at least 20-50 IETF RFCs and you have to be passionate about the future of the Web as a tool to help make humanity better.

You don't have to care about what schema.org or I say, but don't belittle the great technical work that all Invited Experts (and paid participants) do at the world standards bodies. The Internet and the Web wouldn't be what they are today without these organizations researching, creating and publishing open, patent and royalty free specifications.

If you contribute to the Web, you are a part of the entire Web community. It's important that you understand that - if you speak, your voice will be heard. As for questioning if the status quo can be changed - it happens every day. I was able to go from relative obscurity in the standards world all the way to chairing a Working Group at an International Standards body based purely on the hard work that I did to get here. It's fine if you want to be jaded about the world, but there is no $8000 fee required to make a difference (just join the mailing list - it's free). Those of us that are not jaded and believe that the Internet and the Web can make all societies better are working as hard as we can to do just that.