Quote from: acoindr on February 26, 2013, 06:56:12 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on February 26, 2013, 01:39:30 AM

While I agree with the perspective of the OP, the greater gain would be to develop some kind of standard overlay network, across which many smaller BCH's, wallet services, exchanges, etc could interact off of the bitcoin network; and periodicly settle up upon the main blockchain. ...

I like this direction too although I'm not sure how to implement it. It sounds like decentralized accounting which I think would be great, but it seems to me more practical to set up private controlled servers.

No, no. Bitcoin is already decentralized accounting. What I'm proposing would basicly be a VPN for BCH's of many types, some decentralized, others dedicated servers that function like banks. In reality, this is going to happen eventually should the transaction fees ever hit anything that these guys can consitantly undercut. One way to do it now, would be for the ownership of a couple of major wallet services; say MtGox and SilkRoad, were to get together and form a direct relationship, wherein the membership of one institution could send funds to any member of the other institution, and rather than it creating a blockchain transaction, both servers recognize that they are trying to send money to the other, and each credits & debits the appropriate accounts based upon the two institutions' mutual credit. This could be done simply with a set of code on each server that could identify the addresses of the other institution, or simply by clicking the 'use green address' button. These two institutions would have to be willing to hold a balance with each other, up to some point which triggers a settling up. Say, 100 BTC. If buyers on SilkRoad were transfering funds from their accounts at MtGox, buying things from SilkRoad, and a portion of those vendors were transfering funds back towards MtGox on a continuing basis; a large enough mutual credit limit can result in many tranfers between those two institutions balancing out, and thus completely avoiding a blockchain transaction at all, but they are still using Bitcoin. They may not even be aware of the cost saving agreements that their institutions employ. However, in order to do this, these institutions must both be large (in both revenue and membership) and have access control over members' funds. I can't see a way that milti-sig works here.

My proposal is for a standard way of setting up these mutual credit agreements, as well as extending these aggrements in a similar way that Ripple works between individuals. Ripple is actually more powerful between institutions than individuals, IMHO.