[throwaway0x00ff]

It's interesting to compare this model to the Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin. Essentially, the Lightning Network uses this kind of "friendships" (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: https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/intro/blockchain_com... Basically, the differences between LN and Offset would be the security foundation (bitcoin contract) and origin of money (we put actual bitcoin in channels).

Offset's model of relays, nodes, transactions encoding, routing, multi-path payments could very well share a lot with the Lightning Network's model of nodes, gossip protocol, onion routing, and so on. I could even see both systems work together.

I am still going to try Offset with my friends, could be a good experiment!

[matheusd]

Spitballing here but it seems you could even (re-)implement an Offset-based LN by using an alternative (non-PoW) blockchain underlying the channels.

This alternative blockchain would work for accounting purposes so it can be entirely local (i.e. each node has its own local blockchain).