[sorbits]

As I understand it, it is required that people trading units in a ledger trust the ledger’s creator not to issue new units to enrich themselves.

If so, is that much different from using a central service and trust its creator?

[feichtinger]

Hi sorbits,

Yes, you must have some trust in the ledger owner, although, as mentioned in another post, depending on the type of asset it may not be such as issue.

We built the system so that the issuing rules and payment guarantees were separate because we think that's a good thing. We have some ideas as to how we can improve trust and transparency in issuing parties in the future, but that can evolve separately from the payment rules.

Also, we think there is a benefit to payments not being centralised, even while issuance is. For a start, the ledger is signed by multiple parties which increases trust and resilience against faults (malicious or not). From the other point of view, if you are an honest issuer (and most should be!) you don't have to worry about creating a trustworthy and reliable payments platform.

[sorbits]

> Yes, you must have some trust in the ledger owner

Then I fail to see the advantage of a decentralised system, as we can let the ledger owner sign each transaction, instead of a consensus.

> although, as mentioned in another post, depending on the type of asset it may not be such as issue.

Can you elaborate or point me to that comment?

> Also, we think there is a benefit to payments not being centralised, even while issuance is. For a start, the ledger is signed by multiple parties which increases trust

I would consider the ledger owner’s signature more trustworthy than multiple third party signatures.

> and resilience against faults (malicious or not).

Making it decentralised has a much larger attack (and bug) vector, so I wouldn’t conclude that decentralised in itself is an advantage (which I think is really what you are saying).