When Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues were crafting the world wide web three decades ago, they left a key component incomplete. Alongside the familiar 404 error, encountered when a web page is “not found”, there exists a similar code 402 denoting “payment required”. According to web browser maker Mozilla, the 402 code was intended to tell a visitor that they needed to pay to view a certain web page. However, the scheme was never built out. To this day, there is still no standardised way to send or receive payments online. “It’s kind of funny, or tragic, that so many decades into the web’s history, and given the central importance of being able to generate that sort of sustaining income from the internet, that it has gone so undone and under-built,” noted entrepreneur Patrick Collison at a Wired event a few years ago. Collison’s digital payments company, Stripe, has been chipping away at this problem for the past decade. Slowly but surely, Stripe has begun to make the complex, ossified payments system appear simple for millions of its c...

https://www.ft.com/content/6c4af8db-70a8-47fe-858a-a403ec2cc5f1