Re: Opentabs: Money without banks (50 min. video)

On 25 November 2013 19:06, Michiel B. de Jong
<anything@michielbdejong.com>wrote:

> since two years now i have been trying to find time to work more on
> Opentabs, money without banks.
>
> http://opentabs.net/
>
> Since i give a higher priority to the work i'm doing for other projects
> i'm involved in, i haven't made much progress in these two years, although
> a few weeks ago i jumped at the opportunity to give input to this forum at
> the Complicity conference in Berlin:
>
> http://vimeo.com/79024018
>
> i mention there i'm looking for people who want to work on this idea more
> actively. in the past i also worked on it with Melvin from webcredits.org.
> maybe someone on this list is excited by Opentabs, or if you know someone
> who would have time and motivation to explore its concepts, please get in
> touch!
>
> if not, then hopefully you may still enjoy the video :)
>

I enjoyed the video :)

I think in the last 2 years since we first talked about opentabs and
webcredis we've learnt quite a few things, especially from successful
currencies like bitcoin.

Webcredits is based on payswarm transfer without necessarily including the
signing, but that can be added.  As such it's quite close to modelling
bitcoin style blocks but multi currency and with any two counter parties.
What it doesnt do is provide a structure to order the time stamps.  This is
what bitcoin does quite elegantly with the block chain.

So when we discussed it last you wanted to add digital signatures.  I think
we can do that more easily now, thanks to the work by manu.

One other thing you wanted to put into the core is balances.  This is quite
interesting.

So in a ledger system you either

1) Record all transactions and work out balances
2) Record all balances
3) Both

Bitcoin is more (1) and ripple I believe does (3).

I havent worked out a good way to model balances in ledgers, but maybe that
is something we could work on.

Open question is whether we should model these IOUs as a new IOU class or
resuse the payswarm Transfer class (currently).

One thing we've learnt from TrustDavis and Ripple is that trust grants can
be important.  You may trust me to owe you 10 euros but no more.  Each
person can measure trust through a credit limit.

So we have 4 similar concepts IOU / Transfer / Trust Grant / Balance --
does that sound about right?

Finally we need to be able to model this for users and groups, and in some
cases have a trusted administrator enter all the balances (ie grouptabs).


>
>
> cheers,
> Michiel
>
>