Re: [apps-discuss] Proposal for a Finance Area Mailing List

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

> ============================================================
>  Certain functionality required by modern financial systems is not
>  presently available in open, legacy-free, adequately globalized
>  protocols.
>
>  This functionality includes:
>  * Settlement and reversal / cancellation term negotiation
>  * Exchange rate negotiation
>  * Latency calculation / negotiation
>  * Fee, tax and discount calculation / negotiation
>  * Arbitrary currency / asset support
>  * Multi-currency / asset transaction support
>  * Quotation support
>  * Multiple settlement path support
>  * Optional support for in-band settlement (sometimes known as DVP)
>  * High precision decimal value support
>  * Arbitrary financial settlement topology support
>  * Arbitrary communications topology support
>
>  Given this situation, it makes sense to propose a legacy-free,
>  adequately extensible protocol for internet-based financial exchange.
> ============================================================

But here's what worries me (and, again, remember that I'm pushing back
to probe for answers, not as a way of saying "no"):

You're saying that you want to define a new application-layer protocol
(I have no idea what "legacy-free" means) that handles the use cases
you list.  That seems like a very fine thing to want to do.

It strikes me, though, that the denizens of the IETF know little to
nothing about the needs of those applications and use cases, and that
you're likely to encounter some or all of the following problems:

- There will be many nuances, corner cases, and unrecognized
underlying needs that will not be considered in the protocol design
because you'll have a lot of protocol designers but not enough
subject-matter experts.

- You (plural, not you personally) will get very frustrated by people
with experience developing things like LDAP and CoAP and SIP (and,
worse, MPLS and BGP) poking and prodding and telling you that you have
to do this and you can't do that.  Some of it will be valuable input
that you ought to get, but lots of it will be relevant marginally or
not at all.

- Because people don't know much about your field and your use cases,
you will get a lot of people telling you what the working group
charter has to look like, but then very, very few people participating
in the working group, to the point where it will be hard to make real
progress.

The IETF works best when it looks at core Internet protocols and
application protocols with broad applicability (such as SIP, HTTP, and
CoAP) and those that apply to Internet-related functions (LDAP, SMTP,
ALTO).

Looking at the other side, if the IETF can do this, what you'll get is
a bunch of people who know protocol design and can help you get it
right, and who know how to secure Internet transactions.  You
definitely need that.

Barry