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.