Re: [GNUnet-developers] [Help-gnunet] Ideas of debt tracking system to replace currencies

[Jeff Burdges]

A priori, your idea sounds like MakerDAO, as well as I understand them.


Anonymity is not a problem for decentralized system.  There is a problem with 
Sybil attacks just from the underlying network, but any scheme to address that 
can either be transformed into a zero-knowledge scheme that achieves the same 
goals, or else should not be considered a reasonable scheme in the first place.

Anonymity is a essential security property for any payment system because 
without anonymity the payment scheme actively harms the participants.  We 
believe that fungibility breaks down without anonymity too.

It’s true debt interacts poorly with simple anonymity scheme, but one might 
address this in several ways:

1st)  We’d imagine virtual tax payment tokens can enforce taxation in many 
scheme by travelling in the opposite direction of payments.  I recently 
“helped” a friend design a virtual obligation fulfilment tokens scheme for 
cheaper anonymous payment forwarding in payment channels.. where “helped” means 
I kept breaking their designed until they came up with virtual obligation 
fulfilment tokens.  I’d imagine some virtual debt tokens scheme could support 
anonymous payments denominated in debt too, so respected parties authorise 
assuming debt or outright insure the debt, and the tokens they issue flow 
backwards from the money itself.

2nd)  We might settle debts among parties with some zero or low-knowledge 
protocol.  If I wanted to do this, then I might attempt to port our Fog of 
Trust protocol to universal reencryption and associated debts using ideas from 
QuisQuis.

I've never read "Debt: The First 5000 Years” but I’m dubious that replaying 
history works so well for constructing money today.  In any case, individuals 
handle debt poorly for everyday purchases that require anonymity, but well 
enough for large purchases that do not require anonymity, like land.  In fact, 
any debt based distributed payment system built might worsen problems like debt 
slavery, create starvation, etc.

We should therefore focus on non-debt based anonymous pay fine with non-debt 
based anonymous payment schemes, like Taler, ZCash, etc., attempt to wean 
individuals off using debt for small purchases, and leave debt for the existing 
financial world, ideally recreating sane bankruptcy laws in places that lack 
them like Spain.

Jeff

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