Show HN: A practical credit network implementation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A practical credit network implementation

settle.network

11 pointsspolu8 comments

How is this different than say, bills of exchange (at least an 800 year old instrument) which are essentially over the counter iou's

Bills of exchange created tons of credit booms and busts throughout history. How does your system control leverage and make sure nothing "blows up"?

This also seems like it misses the fact that iou's become money. For example, rather than call in a loan / iou, if the iou is to someone credit worthy, then traders just trade the iou back and forth

This works a treat until some calls in a loan and there's no cash to back it up. So again controlling systemic leverage is essential.

The desire to control / smooth boom bust cycles is what ultimately opened the door for the rise of powerful central banks to be the ultimate backstop. And even without a central bank, powerful entities arose naturally in the US for example jp Morgan single handedly backstopped the credit crisis of 1907. Money and power tend to concentrate in a few hands even without central banks

I think your concerns are all taken in account in the formulation of this tool.

I want more information and/or examples of bills of exchange having created booms and busts.

I think the major boom/bust problem arises actually from the existence and power of central banks and its affiliated commercial banks. I don't think that credit generated by people is capable of creating these cycles alone, because there are so many checks against it.

> I don't think that credit generated by people is capable of creating these cycles alone

For the best history of bills i would read charles kindlebergers mania's panics and crashes for a thorough rundown on every sort of credit boom and bust for the last couple hundred years.

Specifically, pages 56-63 4th edition, deal with bills and their close cousin's call money

In that section there's something on the order of 10 crises mentioned. Def worth a read if you're interested in this sort of stuff (gaining a long term perspective of money).

Hopefully fair use excerpt:

"Drawing on bills of exchange is evidently infectious. Described by Adam Smith as normal business practice, it can easily become overdone"

These were particularly abused in the london crisis of 1866 (where there was a central bank) and the aforementioned 1907 crisis (where there wasn't a central bank).

Again quoting kindleberger "the spectacular failure of the DeNeufvilles in 1763 which produced a panic in hamburg, berlin... was the result of the unraveling of a particularly impressive chain of discounts [bills]. If one house fails, the chain collapses and may bring down good names."

also, i would check out hyman minksy for a completely endogenous model of boom and bust speculation.

I agree that pure credit networks left with no supervision have been quite bad historically, but it also appear in our new online world as one of the less cumbersome way to move value at scale. What changed since then I think is the amount of information we have on each actor of the credit network which may lead to other outcomes at scale. Also sub part of the network may be quite safe, as an example the subnet that allows BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange.

> sub part of the network may be quite safe

true, seems like the more something in finance resembles a utility (like a pure conduit or short term store of cash / tokens) the safer it seems to be. altho i guess even those types of agents can get infected if enuf shennanigans are going on around them (e.g. money market's breaking the buck in 2008-2009)

> BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange

thats pretty cool. so thats how stripe's btc processing works? dump the btc for usd (for example) at market via some exchange routing algo? then forward the fiat so the merch never has to handle any cryptocurrency?

I see you've had some relationship with the Stellar[1] currency. Why didn't you use it to implement Settle, since it has innate capabilities of personal asset generation that would very much fit the model of issuing personal GBPs, USDs and so what and then trusting others? (In fact the API is quite the same.)

[1]: https://stellar.org/

Very good question. The cost. I wanted to explore/play with a system with free transactions, which is only achievable interestingly without a global blockchain to maintain.

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