[d10]

Interesting! For folks who like this idea, I recommend looking up Ryan Fugger's Ripplepay (https://classic.ripplepay.com/). That was inspiration for Ripple Labs, who unlike Offset did go the cryptocurrency route (XRP).

I appreciate that Offset is not spawning a cryptocurrency where it doesn't need one. There are other projects influenced by Ripple and Ripplepay which are also not their own currency. For example Synchronized Network Accounting Protocol (https://michielbdejong.com/blog/20.html) and Interledger Protocol (https://interledger.org/).

One of the thought provoking ideas in interledger is that a single payment can be delivered in packets. Meaning that if Alice is making a payment to Bob, some of that payment might go through an intermediary Ivan and some of that same payment might go through Isaac. I haven't read much about Offset, but I saw that it described payments as atomic. Interledger specifically decides not to be atomic. This is not what most people expect with payments, but giving up atomicity gets other nice qualities. For example, if Alice is making a large payment to Bob, they are not limited by the liquidity of any one intermediary. Like data finding an efficient route on the internet, a payment can find an efficient route over interledger.

Glad to know about Offset. I'll add it to my list of interesting network money projects.

[realcr]

Thanks for the kind words! I am a great fan of the classic ripple myself.

[toomim]

Great summary! Let me add that the Lightning Network is also related.