This all looks very similar to a naïve version of the early (~2010) Ripple protocol [1], including all its limitations.<p>An unmentioned limitation is that the system doesn't really suit the 'consumer economy', unless salaries by producers are also paid out in the currency. It does work well for transactions between peers, i.e. friends spending / borrowing – in this system it's essentially the same thing – from each other.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGcVv04unM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGcVv04unM</a>
This is very similar to the ripple pre-cursor called ripplepay. A clear explanation of that can be found here. <a href="https://classic.ripplepay.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://classic.ripplepay.com/about/</a>
Some things I don't understand about the "mint" concept. Is the mint itself intended to be a guarantor of its members' solvency?<p>> User onboarding for the Mint API is left to the discretion of the mint implementor or administrator...<p>If I am registered with a mint, and use Settle to offer to pay someone registered at another mint, who ensures I have those funds? (If it turns out I didn't have sufficient funds, I will presumably become dis-"trust"-ed, but how long will it take for that distrust to propagate? And how would newly-arrived members of any mint know that I'm not trustworthy?)<p>On a more mundane level, how is it envisioned that real-world a$$et$ will enter and exit the settle system? If someone has promised me assets, how do I cash them out of the mint and into (say) my PayPal account?<p>I can imagine in a future scenario, existing banks (or PayPal!) could inexpensively and conveniently act as Settle mints, guaranteeing their depositors up to their banked assets. E.G. my bank, Stanford federal credit union, could easily act as a mint and I would be on the network through it as fernly@sfcu.org. SFCU would "know" that I'm good up to my current balance (or some fraction of it chosen by me).<p>But short of that future day, is it not the case that a person setting up amateur mint must really taking on the responsibility of a banker, holding funds and paying them out on demand?
This looks like an approach more akin to federation (or more accurately confederation) on social networks than the "distributed" notion of blockchain trust, which in practice, as noted, still exhibits centralizing political forces per chain, but is robust to most forms of direct attack. I do think that a mix of approaches is what will happen in the future since the two methods express different levels of trust and liquidity of transaction.
I always think the value Ethereum brings is few when the use case is like "store credit", "in-game reward". This looks like a very promising solution!<p>Edited:
One question: it seems to me that settle service is nothing but a group of rest API end point(include register?), it'll be really useful if i could interactive with it directly with curl/bash without installing any client.
> "But while the operations of such currencies, based on blockchains, have been fully decentralized, the trust graph of these cryptocurrencies have remained entirely centralized. Everyone need to trust Bitcoin to transact in Bitcoin, and everyone needs to trust Ethereum to transact in Ethereum or assets issued on the Ethereum blockchain."<p>Given a string can you programatically determine whether it is bitcoin? (Starting from a string called 'genesis block', asking assumingly malicious nodes for more strings, doing some math you can reach the string in question.) (Note: You cannot do so with ERC tokens, an alarming thing to ponder[0])<p>Can you determine with high probability the "amount of work done" in producing the set over which you previously did math? (This amount acts as the amount of trust we lay behind it, which we determine on our own. We always await anyone who can provide more cumulative work done.)<p>Thus there is no trust graph with bitcoin atleast. (Apart from mining centralization, and users prone to upgrading, bitcoin is pretty close to decentralised and looks to improve in future with physical limits being reached with mining chips and people increasingly opting for immutable code alongwith the immutable chain it calculates on (once all aspects of fungibility like anonymity is solved, users might stop upgrading at all).)<p>---<p>settle.network is just git.<p>All of private blockchains, federated sidechains, colored coins, so-called-smart-contracts-on-eth, premined coins, proof-of-stake coins, etc etc are just PKIs.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.google.co.in/search?q=how+to+check+if+a+token+is+erc20" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.co.in/search?q=how+to+check+if+a+token+is...</a>
> "Currencies operate on a centralized trust graph. This sentence is almost tautological..."<p>Not the case with physical currencies such as precious metals...