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Show HN: A practical credit network implementation

by spolu on 7/20/17, 5:14 AM with 8 comments

  • by profuse99 on 7/20/17, 11:54 PM

    How is this different than say, bills of exchange (at least an 800 year old instrument) which are essentially over the counter iou's

    Bills of exchange created tons of credit booms and busts throughout history. How does your system control leverage and make sure nothing "blows up"?

    This also seems like it misses the fact that iou's become money. For example, rather than call in a loan / iou, if the iou is to someone credit worthy, then traders just trade the iou back and forth

    This works a treat until some calls in a loan and there's no cash to back it up. So again controlling systemic leverage is essential.

    The desire to control / smooth boom bust cycles is what ultimately opened the door for the rise of powerful central banks to be the ultimate backstop. And even without a central bank, powerful entities arose naturally in the US for example jp Morgan single handedly backstopped the credit crisis of 1907. Money and power tend to concentrate in a few hands even without central banks

  • by fiatjaf on 7/21/17, 6:41 PM

    I see you've had some relationship with the Stellar[1] currency. Why didn't you use it to implement Settle, since it has innate capabilities of personal asset generation that would very much fit the model of issuing personal GBPs, USDs and so what and then trusting others? (In fact the API is quite the same.)

    [1]: https://stellar.org/