[p2p-hackers] P2P Micropayments

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

I, Zooko, wrote the lines prepended with "> > ".
MarkM wrote the lines prepended with "> ".

> >I'm very interested in this research!  It includes the "bilateral accounting
> >scheme" that Doug Barnes and Jim McCoy invented for Mojo Nation (called "soft
> >credit windows" in this paper), plus a very good idea of how to safely off-load
> >the token-verification work from a central server to peers.
> 
> What's the relationship to between these ideas and Digital Silk Road?
> http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html

I apologize for saying that Doug and Jim invented that.  The basic idea is
clearly stated in _DSR_, and Doug and Jim explicitly referenced _DSR_ when they
were designing Mojo Nation (personal communication).

Doug and Jim integrated the idea with agnostic Chaumian digital cash,
integrated those ideas into a complete distributed storage system, and led the
actual implementation and deployment of that system.  And they (we) learned a
great deal about the difficulties which the "soft credit windows" idea
encounters in practice.  It's a shame that this experience wasn't written down.

In my opinion, the main contribution of "PPay" by Yang and Garcia-Molina is a
scheme to off-load the token verification service from the O(1) central servers
onto the O(n) peers in the network, thus making token verification scalable.

Regards,

Zooko