Ryan Fugger wrote Smartmobs about Ripple an open-source software project for developing a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honor system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks.

Each participant indicates which other participants he or she trusts, by offering to accept their IOUs up to a certain amount, like a line of credit. To make a payment to someone who trusts you, you simply adjust your IOU balance with them to indicate that that you owe them the amount of the payment. To pay someone who doesn’t trust you, the Ripple system finds a chain of credit connections between you and the payment recipient. Then you pay the first person in the chain, who pays the second person, and so on until the recipient gets paid.

Ryan Fugger wrote Smartmobs about Ripple an open-source software project for developing a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honor system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks.
Each participant indicates which other participants he or she trusts, by offering to accept their IOUs up to a certain [...]