TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Show HN: Offset – Credit card powered by trust between people

150 pointsby realcralmost 5 years ago

37 comments

jonahbentonalmost 5 years ago
Congratulations. You have reinvented tally sticks.<p>Snark aside, I wish you lots of luck, have thought about this model a lot, think there is probably a small place for it in the world.<p>Two suggestions from random stranger on the internet, take them for what they&#x27;re worth:<p>* don&#x27;t use the word &quot;money.&quot; This is a private credit network, not money. Private credit networks sometimes become money, but they don&#x27;t start out that way. Stick to that language.<p>* don&#x27;t solve for &quot;inflation.&quot; There is a lot more to say here but fundamentally there is a tension between store of value and medium of exchange. Be a private credit network&#x2F;medium of exchange, not a store of value.<p>Good luck!
评论 #23454832 未加载
评论 #23455165 未加载
评论 #23452469 未加载
mangodwangoalmost 5 years ago
This is interesting, but I’m really skeptical about the implementation. I’d really kind to see a much more concrete specification, and details about adversarial conditions.<p>It feels like it’s easy to create identities, establish credit lines with no intent to repay, and propagate bad money into this system. It only takes one bad actor to corrupt the chain of mutual credit. From the documentation on the website it’s not clear at all how it handles even simple adversarial conditions like this. The fallback seems to be that you can limit what you are willing to lose by only establishing mutual credit up to a certain amount with each trusted party.<p>If a store doesn’t have a direct relationship with me it has to initiate a payment between an arbitrary number of intermediaries in order to fulfill the credit. Anyone have more insight into the practical application of mutual transitive credit?
评论 #23448679 未加载
stagasalmost 5 years ago
This looked initially like a cool idea, then I realized that to trade with someone you have to have a mutual credit line with them, or through someone who already has a credit line. How is this any different than the current model, where the bank&#x2F;government&#x2F;central money issuer is our mutual credit line and why wouldn&#x27;t this model eventually end up with banker-type people managing the credit for everyone? You could go now to a bakery and ask for mutual credit, the problem is they would prefer the safest route, which is credit through the current monetary system. How is Offset protecting against the same thing happening? Am I missing something?
评论 #23442953 未加载
评论 #23454356 未加载
评论 #23448898 未加载
rydrealmost 5 years ago
This is an idea I always wanted to build, though never got the time.<p>Congrats on the work.<p>Now this is something I&#x27;d be willing to use. I&#x27;ve never used cryptocurrencies before because of POW (I believe it is a fad). But trust based crypto is something that will likely change the world like the internet, and this or something like this is gonna be it. No more banking gatekeepers. No more private credit scores.
d10almost 5 years ago
Interesting! For folks who like this idea, I recommend looking up Ryan Fugger&#x27;s Ripplepay (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classic.ripplepay.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classic.ripplepay.com&#x2F;</a>). That was inspiration for Ripple Labs, who unlike Offset did go the cryptocurrency route (XRP).<p>I appreciate that Offset is not spawning a cryptocurrency where it doesn&#x27;t need one. There are other projects influenced by Ripple and Ripplepay which are also not their own currency. For example Synchronized Network Accounting Protocol (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;michielbdejong.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;20.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;michielbdejong.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;20.html</a>) and Interledger Protocol (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interledger.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interledger.org&#x2F;</a>).<p>One of the thought provoking ideas in interledger is that a single payment can be delivered in packets. Meaning that if Alice is making a payment to Bob, some of that payment might go through an intermediary Ivan and some of that same payment might go through Isaac. I haven&#x27;t read much about Offset, but I saw that it described payments as atomic. Interledger specifically decides not to be atomic. This is not what most people expect with payments, but giving up atomicity gets other nice qualities. For example, if Alice is making a large payment to Bob, they are not limited by the liquidity of any one intermediary. Like data finding an efficient route on the internet, a payment can find an efficient route over interledger.<p>Glad to know about Offset. I&#x27;ll add it to my list of interesting network money projects.
评论 #23454551 未加载
评论 #23458278 未加载
susanoalmost 5 years ago
Cool stuff! This seems to effectively be a digital, distributed, implementation of a LETS[1], a system which has had some popularity in various places at various point of the last 40 years.<p>This sort of system is particularly useful in communities where there is a lack of money. For instance say everybody is unemployed and nobody as money to buy anything, but people would be happy to trade services&#x2F;goods with each other if there was a way to do it efficiently. They could barter but that is inefficient and it is difficult to match services&#x2F;goods of different value.<p>Because the system allows monetary creation, it enables people to start trading even when nobody has money.<p>It may be useful to check out the circumstances in which LETS were&#x2F;are used, as it may be a good indication as to which types of community may be most interested in using Offset.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Local_exchange_trading_system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Local_exchange_trading_system</a>
alexmingoiaalmost 5 years ago
The biggest advantage over bitcoin is that this is truly p2p. Bitcoin isn’t p2p in the sense that transactions require third parties (miners).<p>You can only transact as long as miners choose to mine. If miners stop mining for any reason bitcoin is unusable. There’s also no risk of 51% attacks and hard forks.<p>You could also run offset off the Internet on local networks.
评论 #23453555 未加载
jiofihalmost 5 years ago
Eh. This is how the banking system works.<p>Once some entities in the network become big enough, and transactions large enough to warrant credit checks and so on, what do you have? A bank. This is nothing more than an unregulated settlement system.
评论 #23456156 未加载
johnorourkealmost 5 years ago
This is novel and interesting, and could be used on a micro scale (say a group of friends who regularly split dinner bills) or macro. How would you solve the issue of losing data and nodes (through corruption, hardware failure, etc), or people being offline? I suspect if it grew, people would offer &quot;hosted nodes&quot;, where they keep your data and stay online for transactions 24x7, in return for taking that transaction fee... so, like a bank!
rjmunroalmost 5 years ago
I would market this as an app for a few friends to install and keep track of what they owe each other when one of them settles the bill at a restaurant. Whoever owed the most could settle that day, and everyone else&#x27;s bill would be deducted. A network of friends could expand from there.<p>A &quot;credit card&quot; has negative connotations for many people.<p>Watching the &quot;setting up&quot; video here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.offsetcredit.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;intro&#x2F;app_manual.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.offsetcredit.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;intro&#x2F;app_manual.htm...</a> it&#x27;s too convoluted. Everything that needs turning on should be turned on by default. The default servers should be used unless you go into settings before you start and turn them off. When you add a friend, the default currency should be selected, and a default amount put in ($50 seems a reasonable starting amount that I&#x27;d be prepared for a friend to owe me, but the default should go in settings).<p>It would be good if the names of your friends copied over automatically.
评论 #23461650 未加载
A4ET8a8uTh0almost 5 years ago
Very interesting. I had a somewhat complicated question about sanctions, but I think the main question boils down to whether you are based in US.
tkfualmost 5 years ago
Is there any concept of a distinction between the size of the line of credit you&#x27;re willing to extend to a person directly, and the credit you&#x27;re willing to extend to that person&#x27;s friends (and friends-of-friends, etc.)?<p>Most of the time, if a friend asks for a loan (unless it&#x27;s a really trivial amount), my response will be along the lines of &quot;Sure, what do you need it for?&quot; If my sister asks me to lend her 500 euros because she&#x27;s short on rent, I&#x27;d say &quot;Yes, of course!&quot; But if she asked me to lend her 50 euros because her smack-addict downstairs neighbour really needs it to fix their sink (my sister&#x27;s a soft touch who likes to help people and always gives folks the benefit of the doubt), I&#x27;d say hell no.<p>David Graeber went into a lot of the issues around this in his book &quot;Debt: The First 5000 Years&quot;. The element of debt that&#x27;s monetary and recorded in ledgers is only half of the story. Most of the truth of how we relate to debt is much more socially intertwined.
throwaway0x00ffalmost 5 years ago
It&#x27;s interesting to compare this model to the Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin. Essentially, the Lightning Network uses this kind of &quot;friendships&quot; (payments channels) with the exception that parties do not need to trust each other in order to transact. It would be interesting to add LN to this page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.offsetcredit.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;intro&#x2F;blockchain_comparison.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.offsetcredit.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;intro&#x2F;blockchain_com...</a> Basically, the differences between LN and Offset would be the security foundation (bitcoin contract) and origin of money (we put actual bitcoin in channels).<p>Offset&#x27;s model of relays, nodes, transactions encoding, routing, multi-path payments could very well share a lot with the Lightning Network&#x27;s model of nodes, gossip protocol, onion routing, and so on. I could even see both systems work together.<p>I am still going to try Offset with my friends, could be a good experiment!
评论 #23455761 未加载
kingo55almost 5 years ago
From the website:<p>Incentives: Blockchain: Rewards first adopters. Offset: Early and late adopters have the same money creation power.<p>Does this mean there&#x27;s a negative incentive for early adopters? I.e we take on more risk with an untested technology but late adopters get the same benefits at lower risk, once the technology is mature.
评论 #23452758 未加载
greatgibalmost 5 years ago
It is just a world-wide scaled IOU. The concept looks good to me but still need to evolve a little bit. For exemple, it would be useful to be able to differentiate simple credit lines (negatives) offered to someone and advance&#x2F;collateral that was already provided by this third party.
osrecalmost 5 years ago
Incredibly interesting. As an ex-banker, I&#x27;ve always thought our current money creation mechanism is a bit messed up. This is an interesting alternative.<p>Questions from me:<p>If someone wishes to make a payment, Offset will find the best path via friendships to facilitate the transaction. What if a bunch of people are offline and no path can be found? Does this require the creation of a direct friendship?<p>Do you imagine certain nodes trying to become &quot;hyperconnected&quot; so that they may connect as many people as possible, and earn fees from providing this service?<p>What algorithm do you use to compute the shortest&#x2F;cheapest be path between two counterparties? Does this scale well in a distributed, self-hosted system?<p>How does one establish a friendship&#x2F;trust with another party, and who sets the credit limits for the relationship?
评论 #23454437 未加载
评论 #23454518 未加载
thoughtstheseusalmost 5 years ago
A nation-state will ban or monopolize any competitive alternative to state-backed currency or debt (obligation transfers). Just look at current macroeconomic policy around the world, vast sums of obligations (&quot;debt&quot;) being created.
评论 #23452987 未加载
viraptoralmost 5 years ago
It&#x27;s an interesting idea, but I&#x27;ve got 2 questions:<p>- What happens with fraud? I can reverse my cc transaction, but here there&#x27;s no insurance. (Just in case someone answers with trust - see how many finance SE questions go like &quot;brother asked me to guarantee a loan and disappeared, what do I do&quot;)<p>- How is this usable for people working in online services? I&#x27;m never going to be paid in OUSD, or by local people, so it looks like I&#x27;d either have to continuously exchange money with a person I know, or some banker-equivalent online. That gives me no benefit over CC.
evandijk70almost 5 years ago
Seems quite similar to a Dutch app, wiebetaaltwat, which is used a lot here.<p>It is mostly used for thinks like days out and group holidays, and allows you to share expenses as well. Still, I have heard some people never settle their balance and just have an ongoing list. Whoever owes the most picks up the tab the next outing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiebetaaltwat.nl&#x2F;about&#x2F;how" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiebetaaltwat.nl&#x2F;about&#x2F;how</a>
wolfgang42almost 5 years ago
Is this related to the Offst project that was released about a year ago (HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19756353" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19756353</a>)?<p>I thought it was a neat idea when I read about it then, but never got around to looking into it further. I’ll have to make some time soon to try it out.
评论 #23454538 未加载
Nursiealmost 5 years ago
I&#x27;m amazed how many people are on the &quot;Inflation Bad!&quot; bandwagon these days.<p>Having a flexible money supply that can be manipulated by a central authority for the benefit of the economy as a whole seems to me like a good thing.<p>I like this aspect - &quot;You will not get rich by joining early&quot;, but I fear that without get-rich-quick mania, adoption will be limited.
jfdsfsfdsfalmost 5 years ago
Interesting! Take a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustlines.app&#x2F;#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustlines.app&#x2F;#&#x2F;</a> built ontop of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustlines.network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustlines.network&#x2F;</a> Very similar economic theory, somewhat different terminoloy.
yellowapplealmost 5 years ago
So looking at the economic model, and the transaction where Bob pays through Charli to Dan...<p>This means that Bob can &quot;pay&quot; Dan through Charli, run off without paying, and now Charli somehow owes Dan? Does Charli consent to being in the middle of this transaction? This seems like it&#x27;s ripe for abuse.
评论 #23453224 未加载
jbb67almost 5 years ago
Is there any way to do anything with this right now? Is there anything you can buy or sell with it? Do I need real life friends to use this so I can set up &quot;trust&quot; as this will be a problem preventing me from even trying it out? (I have friends, just not ones that will try this)
评论 #23454525 未加载
Mizzaalmost 5 years ago
I&#x27;m actually kind of into this idea, even if it&#x27;s purely as a Free and Open Source alternative to Venmo. But even then, you&#x27;ll have to give me some good selling points to get my normie friends to use it, as they all already like Venmo.
xrdalmost 5 years ago
I really liked this note:<p>&quot;Offset’s algorithm for discovering routes for payment generally prefers routes with lower fees over routes with higher fees. This allows open competition for fees.&quot;
panosfilianosalmost 5 years ago
Do you have any social media handles? The project is pretty interesting and I&#x27;ll probably address some things on a blog post. I&#x27;d like to mention you when I share.
评论 #23454829 未加载
thinkloopalmost 5 years ago
Being a business owed many small amounts of money from many people seems expensive to collect - any thoughts on that?
jbb67almost 5 years ago
this looks really interesting and an awesome idea. I downloaded the app but then realized that with nobody I know using it, and nobody I can buy things from using it, I literally can&#x27;t do anything with it.<p>any ideas how to use it for ...anything..?
评论 #23456314 未加载
bluesignalmost 5 years ago
I am not sure how this works. Lets say we have path of 4 for a transaction.<p>A - B - C - D<p>Lets say 100usd transaction amount.<p>For the sake of arguement, lets consider every node has 100usd credit one way (reverse path)<p>So if A want to send 100usd to D.<p>A gets 100usd credit from B, B gets from C and C gets from D.<p>Until D spends money, system is locking 300usd credit for 100 usd transaction?
dsr_almost 5 years ago
It&#x27;s interesting that at no time is legality or regulation discussed.
评论 #23454547 未加载
xwdvalmost 5 years ago
Inflation isn’t coming. Interest rate is 0. Banks were ready for inflation for years, it never came. We might even see deflation at some point.<p>Also, I trust very few people. People are scumbags when it comes to money. I’ll take a regular credit card thanks.
ComodoHackeralmost 5 years ago
I&#x27;m not convinced the economic model is viable. Who&#x27;s going to pay the operating expenses?
mister_hnalmost 5 years ago
What if all the people involved are kind of &quot;untrustworthy&quot;(e.g. criminal organizations)?
peter_d_shermanalmost 5 years ago
<i>&gt;&quot;Money creation in Offset<p>Money in Offset is created and destroyed by users. Offset is designed so that the money supply changes to match the market. As the market expands, the money supply increases. When the market shrinks, money is destroyed. Therefore, You will not become rich by joining Offset early.<p>The total sum of balances in Offset is always zero. Consider two Offset friends: Bob and Charli. If Bob’s balance with respect to Charli is x, then Charli’s balance with respect to Bob is -x. The sum of those two balances is always 0.<p>We count the amount of money in an Offset network by summing all the positive balances. For example purposes, consider again the two Offset friends: Bob and Charli. Suppose that initially the balance between Bob and Charli is 0.<p>Next, assume that Bob buys a chocolate bar from Charli for the price of $2. Now the balance between Bob and Charli is -$2 from Bob’s point of view, and +$2 from Charli’s point of view. In the moment of purchase, new money was created by Bob. In this case we can say that the total amount of money in the market is $2.<p>The money created by Bob’s purchase will be destroyed when a complete buying cycle is complete: For example, Charli will use the newly created money to buy something from Dan, which will use the money to buy something from Eve, which will eventually buy services from Bob. When Eve buys from Bob, the money is destroyed.&quot;</i><p>A lot of good and interesting ideas, but what about the Infinite Hotel Paradox, as applied to money?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...</a><p>That is, consider users as hotel rooms, and money as guests for those hotel rooms...<p>That value, as it approaches infinity, is sort of the theoretical upper limit of Milton Friedman&#x27;s &quot;Velocity Of Money&quot; theory...<p>Also, as a side note, you&#x27;d probably find economic islands, that is, users who were corporations, where they produce much more than they consume, where, without taxation or other depletion, money would gel and pool and basically be prevented from circulating...<p>And, what about the people that borrowed, on credit, and never replenished from society what they took? If there&#x27;s no limit, no &quot;credit limit&quot;, then what prevents them from continuing to take, and what prevents everyone from doing this, resulting in a crashed economy?<p>Also, if there&#x27;s no limitation on what constitutes an identity, then what prevents someone from signing up multiple times as different users, and giving themselves extra &quot;credit&quot; (ability to take) and taking, that way?<p>This being said, I think you have a lot of good ideas, and perhaps the only way to know if&#x2F;when&#x2F;where&#x2F;how users &quot;game the system&quot; would be to deploy it -- and see what happens.<p>Does it succeed? If so why? Does it fail? If so why?<p>Either way, information could be gained to determine how to create more robust systems in the future.<p>Your system could work, and I hope it does!<p>Wishing you well in your endeavors!
评论 #23456592 未加载
redis_mlcalmost 5 years ago
&gt; [banker refused to cancel a personal credit card because it was the bank&#x27;s]<p>The comment disappeared, but I wanted to illuminate ...<p>Banks do have reasons for delaying account closures:<p>- good reason - delay closing until statements arrive and are paid. This is also commonly done with checking accounts in the US, which has delayed final settlement for inter-bank transactions.<p>- bad reason - employees get rewards for signups and face consequences for cancellations. See Wells Fargo scandals.
评论 #23456259 未加载
paulie_aalmost 5 years ago
An actual credit card is blazing fast too. I don&#x27;t know how this is immune to inflation.<p>At best this honestly is a solution looking for a problem.<p>At worst it&#x27;s yet another ico scam.<p>I don&#x27;t know why anyone would be interested in this. Sorry to be harsh but I worked in payment processing. This is a project going nowhere because it doesn&#x27;t do anything new or useful