Interledger 2020
I know I'm a little bit late to the party since the year has already started, but you know how life is. My family demanded my full attention over the holidays (at one point, I almost believed my new name was “could-you-please...”) so I didn't get to write this as initially planned.
Due to other obligations and visa restrictions, I have been non-active for about 4 months now so my first and very personal goal is to get back to speed with all the developments that have been happening during my absence. I already spent this morning looking into the Open Payments Protocol proposed by @adrianhopebailie and team and I am amazed by the work that has been put into it. It is definitely a step in the right direction if we want to use Interledger as a means of payment. Since I mainly worked on pull payments last year, I'm very much looking forward to getting involved in the development of the spec as well as the reference implementations.
Last year was actually my first year in the Interledger community and I am very grateful to all the people I met and that helped me to get started, especially @sharafian, @wilsonianb, @adrianhopebailie, @justmoon, and @evan. Without those people and the internship I did at Coil, I would have given up on Interledger. Even though almost everything is documented, I found it hard to find the right information. The 20 minute “Hello World” tutorial is missing and I didn't know where to start. The protocol itself is comprised of so many components that are all connected, that it is extremely difficult to break it into understandable pieces. Hence, I hope that 2020 will be the year of great documentation. We need short tutorials that explain the stack layer by layer, starting with the application layer and then moving down. By the end of this year, it should be possible for a newcomer like me to learn about Interledger without having one of the inventors sitting across the room from you.
Speaking of newcomers, I would like to see a lot more new faces in the community (or names on the forum or call, whatever works for our distributed community), especially women. Last October, I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration and talked about Interledger on a panel about the Internet of Value, which was extremely well received. I can see myself giving talks at meetups in Berlin or elsewhere this year to excite more people for Interledger.
Finally, I have been annoyed by the fact that more and more podcasts move away from being freely available (and giving me their ads in between the story) to being exclusively on Amazon, Spotify, you name it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the ad model, but I also don't want to buy a subscription to all of these platforms. Just like for video, podcasts are an amazing use case for micropayments, especially since there is not the one big platform for them yet (video has youtube and netflix, audio has spotify and apple music). I would love to have a platform for podcasts using Interledger micropayments and web monetization such that there is an alternative for these content creators, just like Cinnamon created an alternative platform for video creators.