A truly open payment protocol should handle any currency (not force you to adopt crypto coins) and would leave it to the merchant and buyer to agree on their settlement method or intermediary, the cancelation and dispute policy etc.

It's entirely possible then that some options would be available, for example in SEPA, that offer instant and irreversible settlement at zero cost.

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__erik 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(x402 author here) Thats actually exactly what the intention with x402 is. Merchants express to the buyer multiple ways that they accept payment and the buyer chooses the one they prefer. As of right now stablecoins on various crypto rails are the major form (largely because they're the easiest to start with from a development standpoint), but as Cloudflare indicated in their blogpost, they're proposing a scheme that uses deferred payment via credit card or ACH https://blog.cloudflare.com/x402/.

	▲	lucasverra 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thanks for stopping by.
	▲	contingencies an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Hi Erik. Frankly, I wonder if this is an elaborate joke since there are some serious concerns in terms of CVP ("wait two seconds and retry"), in terms of gatekeeping potential nobody will sleepwalk in to ("we solve two the second wait with our CoinbaseCoin, get an enterprise subscription!"), or in terms of the inherent lack of openness in HTTP these days (client/server, HTTPS identity chains, DNS, gatekeepers like CloudFlare). For thoughts on a more open protocol without these drawbacks see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... Sincerely, architect of a predecessor exchange (founder asked me not to continue work on open protocols).

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immibis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How would you make it open and decentralized without crypto? I mean, you say it's only open if it supports all currencies, but I say it's only open if it supports all users and use cases, and that's a thing that non-crypto currencies don't do (except for Liberty Reserve, which got shut down by the government for precisely this reason). Like, it's not really open if they have the option to require you to have a Wells Fargo account. We're not falling for the HTTP Cloudflare-great-firewall trick again, I hope.

And for crypto payments they already don't need this because they can use the de-facto-standard Metamask API, at least for Ethereum-compatible blockchains.