cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2264480
From my experience, it seems that any service that offers cryptocurrency payments seems to always set them up as a one time purchase that you manually must renew periodically. Is there any standard that exists, or is in the works that supports recurring payments to a service directly from a wallet?
No, and that’s a good thing.
Here’s the thing, if a vendor can do recurring payments, that means the vendor can take money from you whenever he wants without your authorization. In a world of ACH and payment processors and banks and courts, well it’s not fine but we do it anyway. In a world of digital cash, you’re just giving someone the combination to your safe.
So, you need a program that runs on a schedule that signs transactions for you. This can easily be set up, but you have to run it on a computer, and it has to store your secrets. You can do recurring payments, but a vendor cannot do it for you.
I can think of a proto scheme that a network could deploy, where you sign and send the vendor time locked transactions, but the funds would have to be there when the transaction is signed and that basically amounts to paying upfront and is pointless.
This is exactly what I am referring to. Perhaps it wasn’t clear in my post, but I wasn’t talking about the vendor taking money from my wallet, but the service is set up such that it expects a payment on a regular basis, and your wallet just makes automatic payments for you on a sort of timer.
Yeah well, that’s not that hard, if you’ve got a computer that’s running 24/7 and has access to a node, a CLI wallet that can sign transactions for you. I’m sure there’s some bots like this out there on github or something if you search for them. The real trouble there is, most vendors have very specific requirements to know who made the payment, like including an invoice number in tx_extra, or a side channel message with a tx number in it, stuff like that, a one size fits all not might not work.