Hi Mildred,

Thank you for your message. It reminds me of Ripplepay (
https://ripplepay.com/). Development on the project has stopped in favour
of Ripple, which has some of the same functionality but focuses more on
involving financial institutions. I don't know if there are any active
projects that match your description.

James

On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 at 20:14, Mildred Ki'Lya <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I had some ideas about a payment system that could help us survive the
> next big financial crisis, and I wanted to share it here as I believe it
> might be of interest to some. I come from the postulate that we don't
> necessarily want a currency to exchange goods in a society. All we need is
> a debt management system, and a currency is just one way of implementing
> it. I also come from the idea that monetary creation is a critical point
> for all currencies. It drives the economy. Too much money generated, and
> it's over-inflation. Not enough money and you block the exchanges and the
> economy. We should always be allowed to perform an exchange if both parties
> agrees, without consideration for lack of money.
>
> Inspiration comes from the book "Debt: The First 5000 Years", see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
>
> The question is how to create a completely decentralized system around
> these principles, and I had basic ideas around that. To take the gnunet
> terminology, the network would be composed of different egos, and each ego
> would have debts to creditors and debtors ("créances" and "dettes" in
> French). There is not really any notion of wallet balance there.
>
> When a transaction is made, a debt is recorded in the system and both the
> creditor and debtor would record that debt. This makes a potentially cyclic
> oriented graph. Think of the debt as an arrow coming from the creditor to
> the debtor.
>
> When a debt is recorded, the system would look for cycles in that graph,
> and when the debt to be recorded would complete a cycle, all debts in this
> cycle would be reduced by the minimum debt in that cycle. Let's take for
> example the following graph:
>
>     A --[10]--> B --[20]--> C
>
>     C is owing 20 units to B, and B is owing 10 units to A
>
> In that graph, if a transaction is made between C and A such as it would
> complete the graph, with 15 units as amount, it would lead to:
>
>     ,--> A --[10]--> B --[20]--> C --.
>     |                                |
>     `--------------[15]--------------'
>
> That graph could be simplified to:
>
>     ,--> A           B --[10]--> C --.
>     |                                |
>     `---------------[5]--------------'
>
> The debt from A to B has been purged because A. It's logical. What
> happened is that A provided some goods to B in exchange of a debt, B
> provided some goods to C, and C provided back goods to A. A received
> something in return and B isn't owing anything to B.
>
> What's nice is that before A and C made their transaction, by querying the
> graph, C knows who to ask to purge his own debt (A or B) and A knows who is
> owing to him (B and C). If the graph contains with each ego their skills
> and the goods they can provide, it's a decentralized market where we share
> with our own network. Over time, we will know those people and it won't be
> strangers.
>
> The system could record metrics such as the amount of purged debts and
> non-purged debts. If someone has a great amount of purged debts, it means
> they are contributing back to the community and we can safely exchange with
> them. In contrast, someone with unpurged debts is someone that is not well
> inserted in the economy and that is unbalancing it. In either case, that's
> not a good thing, and people should be mindful of that and try to avoid
> such unbalanced exchanges.
>
> Then comes anonymity. I believe complete anonymity is problematic on
> decentralized systems. Only centralized systems when monetary creation is
> controlled by a single entity can afford complete anonymity, because
> everyone is trusting that single entity. On decentralized systems, you need
> to know who you are exchanging with, and you need to know your community.
>
> That being said, you don't need to know anything that happens on the
> network, you only need to know your local network. We can imagine a system
> hierarchy where you have full disclosure about who is in your local
> community, their identity, but when you exchange with people far away, you
> only need to know what is your community relationship with other
> communities. Then on a more global scale, you only need to know that the
> relationship between your country and the other countries in the world is
> balanced, and don't care about who exactly does the transactions.
>
> That were my ideas. Hope it can be of inspiration.
>
> Mildred
>
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