Quote from: anu on December 19, 2013, 12:16:31 PM

Quote from: MGUK on December 19, 2013, 11:04:15 AM

You said it yourself, the strength of Bitcoin is zero trust, the fundamental concept of ZR is you must place trust, the features of ZR negate the benefits of BTC.

You make it sound as if the purpose of Bitcoin is to remove all need to trust. It is not. Even in a pure Bitcoin financial world, you need to trust and there will be credit.

No, but as you said, as we both agreed, one of the big strengths/salepoints of Bitcoin is it puts the trust in numbers, in cryptography. Adding another layer on top which puts trust in humans negates the benefit of Bitcoin.

Quote from: anu on December 19, 2013, 12:16:31 PM

Quote from: MGUK on December 19, 2013, 11:04:15 AM

I understand that. But my point still stands, the whole system is founded on other people giving eachother accurate credit ratings - something that the banks failed spectacularly at despite lots of experience. What makes you think the average Joe would be any better at it? And what are the implications of wrongly placed trust? E.g. what happens if there's a big financial crisis again, and all of a sudden everyone has less money available, so all the links between nodes in the network are effectively wrong?

It will always happen that people abuse trust. The implication is that you lose that money. So don't trust anyone with amounts you can't afford to lose. I believe that the losses you take with such fraud will be way below the inflation tax and the interest payment to the govt-financial complex.

What makes you say that?
Also, that's a big problem with debt based systems: they work well if you know exactly how much money you're going to earn and spend the rest of your life, but in reality, things happen, medical bills, economic problems, house fires, all these sort of things can ruin a person in debt, and their debtor.

Quote from: anu on December 19, 2013, 12:16:31 PM

For now, ZR is only meant as a way to exchange Bitcoins, should govts crack down on the centralized exchanges. It may evolve into a large credit network - I certainly hope so. But it does not have an incentive to turn everyone into debt slaves, as the banking system has. Because of that, I believe it is not prone to create such crisis as the banking system is, with all these wars which are financed by the printing press. And yes, I believe the average Joe is pretty good at rating his friends. I also hope that ZR helps to educate people about what fiat money is, and how it can be used for your benefit.

Of course ZR is no panacea. It is a tool. I can only offer it and people can accept or reject it. Just like Bitcoin. Just like Linux. I certainly hope that people will try it out and help evolving it into something great. If people choose to continue to place their trust into the govt-financial complex instead, I can at least say that I tried my best.

I appreciate that, I wouldn't ever want to discourage someone from experimenting, exploring and tinkering with things. I envy you for having the commitment and courage to move forward with things like this, by all means, proceed.

I don't think I understand the system fully though. Could you clearly explain, what happens if Alice buys 1 BTC of Bob, but in the sending of the fiat down the chain, one node is dishonest and doesn't forward the fiat, but pockets it instead, what effect does that have on the chain, and who loses money and how is dishonest behaviour punished?