I've finally secured some financial backing for OpenPay and the Open Payment Alliance is in the process of forming.

The Open Payment Alliance is an international organization, structured as a non-profit entity tasked with the job of designing, implementing and maintaining the OpenPay protocol.
The purpose of the OpenPay protocol and its related bits and pieces, is to allow the spending of cryptographic currencies here in the real world.

There are many things we need to do and
We are going to need help, lots and lots of help.

I'm not going to try and list everything we need, but if you're currently looking for a job send a list of skills you have, what your availability is for the next 6 months or so and your salary requirements in BTC.

If selected to join the alliance you will be paid in BTC, or your prefered cryptocoin.  For legal reasons we will not be paying in local fiat.

The list of skills we need to bring to the table is immense and includes, web developers, artists,project managers, copywriters/translators, business people, lawyers (in most countries a notary), embedded developers, you name it we probably need it.

Feel free to post your interest here, however do not post personally identifying information.  You will be contacted via PM if your skillsets are something we can use.

Actually it's not dead, but it was nearly killed due to contractual obligations.  The slow down in release has more to do with the fact that a company is renting my intellect for a bit and as long as they are renting my intellect, then any fruits of that intellect belong to them if there is any parallel between said fruits and the tasks I am being paid to accomplish for them.  There was some strange verbage in my contract and so I asked for and received a clarification on my contract that says I just can't do it during business hours or use any client resources without their express consent.

Therefore I'm proud to say that I have now officially received the OK to continue working on Isis-ATP AND OpenPay.
I was very surprised to actually obtain the go ahead and am really glad I did.

Now I just need to find the energy at the end of the day to actually put into it and start a proper project plan on these 2.

Thanks for sticking it out!

OMG, I had no idea Twist was into bitcoin.  So how are Shout, Kiki & Marina feeling about this idea?  Are they on board as well?

(If you don't know what I'm saying, you don't have preschoolers)

That's brilliant!  Not sure about the colors though.

The SEC or some of entity probably cracked down or threatened to.
Besides the fact that they have been randomly delisting stocks with no notice to shareholders, there are people hunting pirate right now and a bunch of other scams & bs that GLBSE was very laisse faire about.  Technically that makes them and their owners complicit in fraud.
 
However my feeling is that they weren't shut down per se, merely advised to shutdown, probably by their attorney, until a determination of legality could be made and a course of action could be taken.

Protip guys, don't start a business like this without first hiring a lawyer who specializes in finance & securities law, period.

At the moment they probably have a forward going safe harbor under the jobs act.  However prior to the enactment of that they are very likely to be found as having operated a broker/dealer without a license.  Unfortunately that's the type of thing that prevents you from ever getting one.

I'll play Armchair lawyer here for a few and give my 0.02 BTC

It all depends on the nature of your business and what you're trying to accomplish.
For 99% of things you may want to do, it's just easier to setup shop close to home, unless of course you're from the land of the repressed and home of the fearful.

For many things we have been doing with bitcoins in the USA, you would be running afoul of our lovely labyrinth of financial compliance laws that require you to either give all of your customers a financial rectal exam, or let the government will give you one, sans lube.

If you're in the states and need to protect yourself from your government, it's probably best to setup your core business outside the USA to deal with all non-USAians (notice that I don't say Americans, because let's face it folks, we stopped being real Americans the day we let the PATRIOT Act pass).

If you want to deal with folks stateside just setup an LLC in Wyoming and make sure you have a damned good lawyer do it properly for you.

Belize is great if you just need a nice friendly place to stick an entity that won't actually be doing business in belize.

New Zealand is alright from an "easy setup" perspective, but considering that the government there seems to LOVE being the USA's little b!tch lately; I don't think it's somewhere I would want to setup shop if there is ANY chance I could become a target.

And what about the other $900k?

Unfortunately it would be against the terms of my contract to disclose the client or any of their recruiting or operating methods.  And I ABSOLUTELY cannot tell you that they contacted me first based on my work on things such as ATP & OpenPay.  Therefore I have to remain silent on the subject (for 3 years, gawd I hate NDA's). 

I CAN say that I posted a month or so ago in the OpenPay thread about a conversation I had regarding certain banks taking a long hard look at bitcoin.  Lot's of good stuff in there.  Just an FYI!

@nomoreecoin
That's a great start, I worry though about the helm (boat steering wheel), since it's very similar to the symbol used to denote the 8 fold path which is a sacred religious symbol.  Can you try it without handles?

For the record we do need to try and avoid any similarity to religious symbols if at all possible.

That said, feel free to use common sense, for instance the "All seeing eye", is pretty ubiquitous on currency and has come to be almost synonymous with money.  Therefore incorporating it into your design would probably be alright even if it's technically a judeo-christian symbol.  It's essentially been co-opted by us money mongers

bump!

Branding it as a game won't solve the issue.  If money is changing hands it always runs afoul of AML & PATRIOT act type laws, game or no game.  We gotta keep them thar terrists in their place and if it means we get to give every citizen of the world a financial rectal exam all the better!

Anyone who thinks they are able to skirt the law in this regard, simply by attempting to reclassify their business as a "game" is sorely mistaken and will end up being spanked by the law at some point. 

Point of fact, a contract requires 3 things; offer, acceptance and consideration.  Consideration is usually money, but can literally be anything.  Courts tend to treat non-money consideration in terms of it's monetary value in a fair and open market.  Thus if you're swapping bonds for BTCs, the open market value of those bonds is the market value of the BTCs.  Trading them requires the exact same (if not more), limitations and verifications as trading against those bonds in local fiat.

I promise you a judge will look at bitcoin and BTC denominated transactions, the exact same way as ANY foreign currency contract.

Your best bet is to incorporate in some foreign country with lax securities laws (idontgiveadamastan), and then set your self up as a proper exchange in THAT country.  Not every country requires compliance with US laws and US law can't really touch you in those countries, they're just damned glad to see some money moving through their country.

banking4bankers.com has some good resources to point you in the right direction.  My current fav if you're a USAian is to start looking at Belize for this sort of thing.

Signed up with your cr8 code.  I figured what the heck, you and I bump heads enough, if you give it a thumbs up it must be alright.

OpenPay is an effort to bring Bitcoins from Cyberspace to Meatspace by creating a new payment network and leveraging existing infrastructure wherever possible.

What exactly that means, will depend on what role you play in the transaction.

If you're a merchant it means you'll be able to process transactions from anyone, anywhere at anytime in any currency without fear of chargebacks and with no network fee.

If you're a consumer then it means you can travel anywhere in the world and pay for anything in preferred currency, with no hassle.  You aren't charged interest, you have no extra fees to pay and unlike a prepaid credit/debit card, your OpenPay BTC balance is fully insured against theft and unauthorized charges.

If you're a service provider (Bank, Exchange, eWallet or other deposit accepting institution), becoming a member of the Open Payment Alliance and offering OpenPay enabled wallets means that you can give your new and existing customers confidence that their BTC balance is fully protected against loss, theft, or other liquidity problems.


From the perspective of someone helping out in this contest; OpenPay is best thought of as the next Visa, Mastercard, American Express, in otherwords a new payment type that will soon be accepted by merchants and used by consumers around the globe.  This means the logo should fit in one of the standard formats, such as this...
http://www.instamerchant.com/credit-card-logos/american-expres-visa-master-cards-medium.gif
Same proportions any ways.

I do like all of the submissions so far, keep up the good work!

I've been doing some looking for a place to semi-deepfreeze funds for a period of about a year and have them generate interest instead of sitting in a paperwallet somewhere.

I was wondering what everyone's thoughts are about Pyramining (www.pyramining.com)
Is it considered legit and at least moderately safe?  It sounds like a good plan but has anyone actually verified they have the hardware etc and aren't a ponzi?

Thanks for any info!

Wow!  Those all look fantastic!

I like it.  Maybe try different currency symbols in different places.  I'm curious as to what this would look like with Euro, GBP, Yen etc in different places.

Also we need a square shaped logo for icons.

It's official, I've just been brought on full-time on a project with a major bank (Not JcPenny's but the first letters are JP), to build their next gen trading platform.

Isis-ATP was the catalyst for their bringing me on, that along with my knowledge of Bitcoin.  Still I'm not sure what their plans are yet, and I won't be allowed to tell you once I do know what they've got planned, but I've been told I have until Oct 8th to finish Isis-ATP.  I'll still be allowed to work on OpenPay beyond that, but they want me to get Isis-ATP out the door before I start with them.

Now we have a hard cutoff date, that means It's crunch time people, so here I go!

(This does mean someone else will have to take over maintainer-ship of Isis-ATP during my tenure with this client (1 year) and during the 2 year non-compete period, so do we have any volunteers?)

Almost forgot to mention, we get around an accidental replay attack (i.e. a double charge), by only allowing a one time spend to a single address when funding a "send me money" request.  We can also limit it so the same amount can only be charged once per day or something.  Both of these options would be up to the wallet implementer/maintainer to enforce. 

The modifications I'm making at the present time mean that the merchant would tie a unique transaction to a one time use bitcoin address.  This will invalidate the signature hash on the "send me money" message and thus make it much harder for someone to attack.

It would take a compromise from inside the merchant themselves to pull it off because an attacker would need to have captured the private part of the key which is never broadcast and is only a transient variable stored in RAM long enough to calculate a public key and sign the message.  To attack this way you would need to have wire level snooping between the POS terminal and the merchant gateway (such communications are supposed to be encrypted) or a completely compromised gateway to pull it off (not impossible, but hardly easy).

I'm working on a fork of bitcoinj that can handle the messaging and message relaying.  If your wallet knows it got a payment, it will know it got a payment request as well.  What you do from there is up to you as a wallet implementer.


The full node & validation problem are one reason why I made the switch I've mentioned in my last post.

"On Card" validation is something only possible with the EMV card option which is slated for a later release because as I said, "we need to do a lot of paperwork to get ISO to recognize us."  The change here is relevant to magstripe aka the ANY CARD option.

With ANY CARD, a key is generated deterministicly from the numbers on the front of the card and I do mean ANY CARD, I recommend an old expired or spent gift card, or a dead credit card, doesn't matter it's just the seed for a keypair. 

This keypair is not intended to be used as a wallet key, it's just there so the merchant can send a valid message with a "from & to" address and provide a signature on that message that corresponds to something that a client can recognize as "the key to my masters house" so to speak.

Once the "send me money" message hits the wallet software, it is up to the wallet to determine whether or not to fund the request.  I recommend at a minimum, either allowing the user to set a spending limit for when they are away from the keyboard, or popping a dialog box that says "Hey are you really trying to send money to this guy?" 

The funds to be used come from the general wallet, and should follow the same path as it currently does when you want to send someone money.  However the key generated from the card is a marker and should not be a wallet key.


Hope my answers make sense.  BTW still can't get MultiBit to compile, looks like it depends on a version of bitcoinj "0.3-SNAPSHOT" that maven can't resolve.  Any ideas, please PM me.

OpenPay is picking up more steam everyday. 

Unfortunately, while managing projects, designing software, and coding them are all core competencies for me, Art is not.

Therefore I propose a contest!

Post your best OpenPay logo here.  It must be brandable, unencumbered and most importantly it needs to be unique and not a spin on someone else's trade or service mark.  No watermarks allowed please.

Ideally there should be a logo for "OpenPay" the payment network, and another for "The Open Payment Alliance" a non-profit being founded to manage it.

Please post either an SVG or png.  PSD or other original source form will not be needed until payout of the bounty.

In 1 month from today I will post a poll with the various submissions as show in this thread.  The winner will be chosen by popular vote.

If I see high quality submissions, I will probably increase this bounty to as much as 50 BTC before the voting begins.