Architectural and social aspects of mutual credit networks
Architectural and social aspects of mutual credit networks, or another way to put it, decentralized monetary systems based on social trust and IOUs, are interest-adjacent for me.
You might say, doesn't Bitcoin solve this? Topologically, Bitcoin is multi-party, but logically centralized around a single global ledger and a specific consensus ruleset that everyone must follow. Ripple Classic / Social Trust seeks a topological decentralization, where the network is a web of local trust rather than one giant, global competition for a single block. With social trust, every user is their own "mint" -- you decide whom to trust and for how much. Trustless (Bitcoin) vs. trust-based.
You might think a monetary system based on social trust would be pretty easy to implement, and you'd be right if it were just you and your friends, but it's deceptively tricky at scale.
So it happens that I've been following the Ripple project since Ryan Fugger's early days. There was a dark time when Ripple turned into corporate-led XRP, so don't be confused by that, but now again there's a small community of decentralized monetary architects working on different projects in the "Classic Ripple" vein, and one of their coordination points is the "rippleusers" Ripple Project Google Group mailing list.
If this description so far tickles your fancy, or if you know someone who might be interested, consider checking out the archives and/or subscribing to the list (no cost):
https://groups.google.com/g/rippleusers/
The group is low-volume, high-signal, and has announcement of other ecosystem projects such as Swaptacular, Villages.io, Rumplepay, Resilience, ripple.archi, Web Ledgers, and Credit Commons.
For a tiny preview, here's a short Pete+Gemini 3 conversation asking about the topics rippleusers covers:
https://gemini.google.com/share/d25ea79eca5c
Some of the technical explanation in this email is from that conversation with AI.
A current discussion caught my eye, talking about using Nostr to provide a sync layer to a Ripple-ish payment protocol. I'm a big fan of the Nostr architecture, and at a meta-level, their NIP (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) process, an RFC-like way they iterate collaboratively on standards, so I like it when Nostr pops up in odd contexts. :)
Pete