Hey, cool! I worked on something similar a long time ago:<p><a href="http://ripple.ryanfugger.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ripple.ryanfugger.com/</a><p>Have you looked into using the Interledger Protocol? It's the most advanced evolution of the concept I know:<p><a href="https://interledger.org/" rel="nofollow">https://interledger.org/</a><p>Also, how do you propose to grow this network? That always seemed like the hardest part to me.
I think this is a very interesting idea. A couple of questions:<p>1. Why is the mediation fee 1 credit? This appears to be an arbitrary choice with no rationale. Why not let the market decide?<p>2. What prevents me from setting up a fake node and just extending myself a bunch of credit? Is this where human judgement/trust comes in? I.e. my friends trusting me that I'm not engaged in this sort of manipulation? (I'm not saying this is inherently a flaw, just curious if you've considered it).<p>3. In the Alice, Bob, Charli example, why don't Bob and Charli just link up instead of more-expensively going through Alice?<p>I have my own answers to these questions, but I'm curious what your response is. I can see this project going in a slightly different direction from how you describe it in the initial release. Feel free to contact me at <my username> at gmail dot com if you're interested in discussing in more depth.
This is pretty cool. Obviously inspired by Ripple, but I like another implementation without cryptocurrecy or global consensus.<p>The key difference seems to be that there’s only one currency of account, credits. I find that interesting, not in a bad way.<p>Let’s say I started a trustworthy node. I offer to issue 1000 credits per bitcoin someone deposits. All publicly accountable and with some crypto black magic (for the sake of argument), trustless.<p>Would this create an off-chain payment solution?
I think this is the right direction as I think all money is a form of debt - usually coupled with some settlement mechanism. Once we get a good implementation of debt settlement then I think we might actually get a usable decentralised money.<p>As a few comments have pointed out this similar to the Lightening network and Ripple. One comment mentioned that Ripple never found a routing algorithm and that is also a major criticism of Lightening, see for example [1].<p>How are you planning to address these challenges?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE</a><p>P.S. I only came across Rick Falkvinge today so I don't know how controversial he is in the crypto space. Given that he backs BCH I guess he might be.
All the ideas are simple and as old as Fugger's Ripple. The part that is missing to all "mutual credit" payment system is how to do atomic transactions.<p>The linked article doesn't explain that which should be the most important and non-trivial part of the entire thing, it only says:<p>> The core of Offst is the credit pushing mechanism. It allows to send credits along a route of mutual credit edges in a secure way. You can read more about it in the project documentation.<p>The project documentation doesn't have a section dedicated to explaining how they solve these problems. Or at least I couldn't find it.<p>EDIT:<p>I found it, it's called "Introduction to backwards credit payment". Basically A sends a promise to B and B a promise to C, then C signs some stuff that fulfills B's promise and B signs some stuff that fulfills A's promise. That's all great, however, if in the backwards path if A is offline or unresposive the transaction is left in a partially-committed state that hurts B, for example.<p>See discussion of this and many many other ideas (all flawed in some way or another) at <a href="http://ripple.ryanfugger.com/Protocol/Index.html" rel="nofollow">http://ripple.ryanfugger.com/Protocol/Index.html</a><p>The Lightning Network implements the same "backwards" stuff. However the transaction cannot be abandoned in the middle because the HTLCs can be enforced on the blockchain (of course this has problems because most of the times it's not economical to enforce these things on the blockchain, but anyway).<p>EDIT 2:<p>I'm not saying this to shit on the idea. I really think it could work if it's based on real-life relationships so A is not going to try to cheat on B during a transaction, but at the same time if that is true we probably don't need so much commit things and signatures.<p>Now back to trust-minimized schemes, perhaps Interledger's idea of streams of minimal payments could work better in this context, or since Offst is relying on indexes, relays and other server infrastructure it could as well rely on third-party commit registries.
There's a very similar project called Interledger.<p>It uses the same mechanism of credit payments over multiple hops. But denominates each hop in a particular (possibly different) asset to help settling the credit between peers.
So this is like the lightning network, but channel balances are never closed out to any kind of global ledger? If this were to be put into use, you would run into the following problem very quickly:<p>Bob’s debt to Alice grows beyond the point where Alice is willing to trust him since Bob is mostly using the system to buy things.
Could this be integrated to ActivityPub-based services, like PeerTube, Mastodon, Friendica etc.? That was one of the missing pieces for independent infrastructure, e.g. for paying artists or developers for their work without getting frozen by PayPal & similar once money start flowing.
Interesting! Do you plan a less nerdy user interface? I'm afraid to say so, but a mobile phone app could be a game changer. (Yes, it would drain the battery, and yes, it could run on an old phone because many people have them in their shelves)
I owe two friends money right now, and I have two friends who owe me more than that.<p>In order for this to work I've got to get the one who owes me to agree to create these credits and give them to me. Then, when I pay the credits to my 2 friends I owe, who is going to buy those so they can get their money out? How do I get the rest of my money out?<p>How could these debts be traded? Why would anyone buy them when they have to trust specific people they don't even know, and who may not even exist, to honor them?<p>The original Ripple concept failed for very good reason. When there's enough trust/credit/goodwill systems such as this don't add any value, and when there isn't they are useless.
I am super confused, if balances are purely a factor of owed vs owing how do you gain credits, and how do you transfer the value of non-credit value (like the example of a bike).