Thomas Baekdal posted a great article we need to drastically simplify payments online that has received quite a bit of attention today.

His proposal is to use an iframe to a third party payment site similar to how Facebook embeds it’s widgets. This would allow you to pay very quickly as well as selectively share address, email etc. with the merchant.

We in the OpenTransact actually proposed something very similar last year at the Internet and Identity Workshop.

OpenTransact is a new very simple standard for performing amongst other things payments. It is designed to be extremely simple to use and embed. It is already being used in my startup PicoMoney as well as various other sites such as Austin Time Exchange.

OpenTransact allows anyone to create very simple payment links that we call TransferRequests. This allows you to format a link very easily …