Show HN: Offset – Credit card powered by trust between people
This is interesting, but I’m really skeptical about the implementation. I’d really kind to see a much more concrete specification, and details about adversarial conditions.<p>It feels like it’s easy to create identities, establish credit lines with no intent to repay, and propagate bad money into this system. It only takes one bad actor to corrupt the chain of mutual credit. From the documentation on the website it’s not clear at all how it handles even simple adversarial conditions like this. The fallback seems to be that you can limit what you are willing to lose by only establishing mutual credit up to a certain amount with each trusted party.<p>If a store doesn’t have a direct relationship with me it has to initiate a payment between an arbitrary number of intermediaries in order to fulfill the credit. Anyone have more insight into the practical application of mutual transitive credit?