I am bouncing a few ideas around and wanted to get some market feedback from the community.
Please let me know if you would be interested in a service that allows you to create a recurring payment to or be requested from another user.
The idea is from my view pretty straight forward.
You have a service that people subscribe to and want to be paid in bitcoin or other alt-coin on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.
I'm not sure there's a place in the ecosystem for an external system to do this as it kind of goes against the overal philosophy of democratizing banking and all of the services and features it offers..... Doncha think?
That said, I definitely think a solution is needed. My preference is that a protocol be established whereby two clients (one could be a business using a commerce service like Bitpay or something) have the capability of establishing a trusted relationship. Two kinds possible:
A: A fixed recurring payment that you establish for sending on a schedule (I do this with my rent for example).
Difficulty low as it's a wallet side feature, though it would be handy if my landlord could send me a request which contains the amount, deposit address, frequency cycle, etc.. Wallets would need UI features for managing these recurring payments.
B: A variable recurring "pull" payment whereby a service deducts from your account each month what you owe. (I do this with my mobile phone, car loan, etc.. I trust these parties but also have recourse with my bank if I ever think they took too much.)
(For the record, I know some are suspicious of this banking arrangement, but I LOVE this feature because I really don't have the patience to deal with common trusted invoices each month. I just want them paid as long as the money deducted fits within "normal" bounds and matches the invoices which I review periodically to make sure they're fair. Mortgage, rent, car payment, cell phone bill, and utilities are all prime targets for this arrangement, and conventional banking will always exist if there's no equivalent solution in crypto currencies.)
Difficulty to accomplish: My brain boggles. I've poured some thought into it and can imagine a new out of bandwidth (meaning not in the blockchain) protocol for wallets to establish and manage these kind of long term relationships with each other.... But to prevent wallets from all doing it differently a standard should be developed which sounds like a sizeable research and dev project. But I think it's possible to do in a decentralized whay that exists separately from the blockchain, and which isn't through 3rd party services who would increase transactional friction with fees.
Groan, maybe a 3rd party service is the best way.
I don't have any hopes that this would be developed in the near future as the bitcoin project has some bigger fish to fry first. (Like sorting out floating / fair transaction fee reckoning, zerocoin or similar mixing, blockchain pruning, increasing transaction per second scalability, etc...) I guess a wallet developer could take on the design challenge. I've searched several times in the past and haven't found anyone working on this yet.
But I'd love the feature!
