Game theory that removes race condition from Interledger "universal mode"

Interledger "universal mode" is based on Ryan Fugger's idea to commit the
payment from the seller and towards the buyer (with "staggered timeouts"),
enforced with a penalty where the full payment is the penalty. There is a
race condition as the penalty is the full payment. This race condition can
be removed by reducing the size of the penalty, by making it continuous
once the payment has timed out (rather than an "all or nothing" penalty).

To set up a continuous small penalty instead of the full payment penalty,
two extra steps are needed. Here, what Ryan Fugger called "commit" is
instead called "finalize". The initial "commit" step is instead what sets
up the penalty. The "commit" signal moves from the buyer towards the
seller. If the commit step does not succeed, the buyer has an incentive to
cancel the payment. The incentive comes from that the buyer is the one
paying the fees. If "commit" reaches the seller, they inform the buyer of
this, and the buyer will formally revoke their right to cancel (leading to
the second added step, "seal payment").

For "seal payment", the penalty rate is reduced once a user has propagated
the signal. This means that penalty is collected faster on the buyer side
of an intermediary who has not yet propagated "seal payment" than on the
seller side. Thus, the intermediary is left paying for the fees (the buyer
also has to pay some fees but this can be balanced to be much lower than
the intermediary attacker).

Then once "seal payment" reaches the seller, they issue "finalize" (and the
same game theory as Interledger "universal mode" already uses comes into
play, albeit *without a race condition*).

This is all formally defined with illustrations in my multi-server Ripple
whitepaper <https://ripple.archi/ripple-multi-server.pdf>.

With this the dream of Interledger becomes possible as "universal mode" no
longer has the detrimental race condition. And, the dream of Ripple,
person-to-person IOU based payments via person-to-person trustlines, also
becomes possible (such platform I already built, see my website
<https://ripple.archi/>), and on top of Ripple also my redistribution
system Resilience (also built, see my website <https://ripple.archi/>).

Peace, Johan