Re: Nomenclature proposal: "federated asset" (was Re: On Interoperability)

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 2:35 PM, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:

> The draft tipjar.com answer to this is to not support
> non-participating currencies at all, beyond allowing people to
> register their flavor of chit as a liaison for one. USD, for instance,
> is represnted by "tipjar classic" which operates by paper checks
> mailed to a post office box, and nothing more modern, by design. Call
> that TJUSD. If someone else wants to also liaise for USD, they may,
> ideally if PayPal wanted to be very kind to us they would register as
> a competing liaison for USD and their symbol would be something like
> PPUSD.
>

It seems more and more like you invented OpenTransact 15 years ago. :D


>
> maintaining "nostro" accounts and offering each other credit lines on
> an external currency that is liased by multiple entities can be done
> entirely with currency definition and "give" functionality -- if Alice
> gives Bob a 10000 USD credit line, that would be represented as Alice
> defining a currency representing credit with Alice and issuing Bob
> 10000 USD worth of it. And so on.
>
> One problem is, that "And so on" might not get spoken to an audience
> who can see the "and so on" as a set of trivially collapsing dominoes
> leading to wherever.
>
> It's really quite the impressive magic trick, that all the financial
> institutions honor each other's checks, and close to immediately, too.
>

It is quite amazing. Most people never quite understand all the magic
behind it.


>
> So defining standards, or at least recommendations, for accounts
> between trusted liaisons to a common external asset type seems like a
> reasonable request. One might call it perhaps the "extension for
> federation"  and refer to an asset type that is good at any
> participating federation member a federated asset
>


I would absolutely second a federated asset extension to OpenTransact.

It might be as simple as having links to accepted assets within the asset
meta data element:

http://www.opentransact.org/core.html#asset-meta-data

These links could be the start of the decentralized ripple like federated
asset system.

P


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