I joined dev.to few years back. I noticed they have this system called paymentpointers. This was added into their forum way earlier before this tech gets mainstream. BAT was just getting it's muscle flexed for being first to try something like this in the market. The open payments protocol started this payment pointer concept.
So let's try and understand how this open protocol works and may become future.
Image Credit: openpayments
How does this work?
Basically say you own a twitter account, youtube account, website or blog or any property where you have option to add the payment pointer becomes your POS for accepting tips for your content. So if you are a blogger, creator of various type of content format. You can use the payment pointers to accept the funds.
This payment pointer can be attached to your wallet for specific type of the currencies like BAT, ETH, BTC etc. And when the funds are pushed to your address. You can see it reaching the wallet based on the payment pointer references. Uphold and the gatehub are among the first to utilize the protocol.
Where's the future? What's the use case?
Now currently the focus is on the creator economy. But I am sure if the right people have means to develop the decentralized apps. It can make a good progress and become widely accepted open payment platform. In the context of the payment acceptance, this seems to be the truly the right and decentralized way to accept and send the money online.
I feel it would take a lot of time for this use case to come into the hands of the average public. I suppose the protocol needs more implementations on the websites and the payment places. This way the more people get to adopt the protocol and choose to use it in the everyday life.
It's going to make using browser based payments more secure and also donating, supporting various type of creator or non-creator economies easier.
