[osrec]

Incredibly interesting. As an ex-banker, I've always thought our current money creation mechanism is a bit messed up. This is an interesting alternative.

Questions from me:

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?

Do you imagine certain nodes trying to become "hyperconnected" so that they may connect as many people as possible, and earn fees from providing this service?

What algorithm do you use to compute the shortest/cheapest be path between two counterparties? Does this scale well in a distributed, self-hosted system?

How does one establish a friendship/trust with another party, and who sets the credit limits for the relationship?

[geocar]

> 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?

What do you think happens when Visanet is down?

My experience is people either delay their purchase, or they find some other medium to exchange.

> What algorithm do you use to compute the shortest/cheapest be path between two counterparties? Does this scale well in a distributed, self-hosted system?

That seems to be answered here; looks like it's not distributed.

https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/theory/network.html

> How does one establish a friendship/trust with another party, and who sets the credit limits for the relationship?

That seems to be answered by the demonstration videos; each party sets the credit limit they offer to all of their friends separately.

[realcr]

Hey osrec, I wish I was an ex-banker. This kind of experience would have really helped me when working on this.

For your questions:

> What if a bunch of people are offline and no path can be found?

If no path can be found, the transaction will fail. This is truly a weak point of Offset. I have been thinking about this for a while myself, here are the possible solutions:

1. Currently Offset takes a lot of battery to use (because of communication). Maybe in the future battery won't be a problem for mobile phones. In that case people will stay online and connected most of the time. The incentive might be to make money through fees.

2. Maybe some people will decide to be "hubs", and always be online. Offset has a desktop application too (though a CLI based at this time). You can run it as a server, so that it always online.

> Do you imagine certain nodes trying to become "hyperconnected" so that they may connect as many people as possible, and earn fees from providing this service?

Maybe. But I hope that there will always be enough competition, so that people will be able to find cheap enough routes.

> What algorithm do you use to compute the shortest/cheapest be path between two counterparties?

Currently, a very lousy algorithm, the most basic thing that works. This part really needs some work. My idea is that every index server could implement his own magic thing, and you could pick whatever index server you like.

> Does this scale well in a distributed, self-hosted system?

I think it does. Not sure that with the current implementation, but it might with some improvements.

> How does one establish a friendship/trust with another party,

Check the video, I show this one!

> and who sets the credit limits for the relationship?

Each party gets to pick one credit limit. If A and B have a relationship, A gets to choose how much B can ever owe A, and B can choose how much A can ever owe B. To summarize: You get the choose how a maximum cap for your fortune.