Worth mentioning what Gavin's response was to this proposal:
> RE: Mr. Stanish's suggestion to punt all of this and wait for a Grand Unified Solution:
> No, we have problems that need a solution right now. And, having written one (I was the lead author of the ISO/IEC 14772-1 international standard) I'm very pessimistic about your chances for anything like IFEX to actually be adopted.
Right, that was understandable if a little disappointing.
First, let us unravel the underlying assumption, which is false. When sharing a standards proposal, one isn't necessarily hoping everyone blindly adopts it as gospel but rather it provides some basis for reasonable research and/or provisional implementation within a given area that (hopefully) benefits from previous research and provides a basis for the community building upon the knowledge gained through implementation of systems in that area. The idea is that, given some common ground, people can move forward (ie. towards interoperability) while benefiting from each others' experience, and hopefully the better connected, more heterogeneous and stronger community that results.
In the particular case of IFEX, we have thus far been dealing with extremely basic areas that remain ignored by Bitcoin, ie. market identification, asset identification, and a viable decentralized internet-based financial endpoint identification scheme that provides familiar syntax, checksum protection against transposition errors, ease of integration with legacy financial systems, typo-squat-protection, and other key features. Also in the works but far more complex and slower moving are more holistic approaches to the transaction metadata/invoicing problem area than Bitcoin is apparently prepared to tackle.
The other thing that is notable in Gavin's response was the apparent notion that engineering decisions affecting the entire Bitcoin community's future are being made on a rapid basis because of perceived short-term needs. I am not sure this is necessarily a trend, but as an implementer it doesn't give me the greatest peace of mind.
> RE: Mr. Stanish's suggestion to punt all of this and wait for a Grand Unified Solution:
> No, we have problems that need a solution right now. And, having written one (I was the lead author of the ISO/IEC 14772-1 international standard) I'm very pessimistic about your chances for anything like IFEX to actually be adopted.