bitcoin

PathCoin: off-chain transferring coins as small files

AR0w

Abstractly, this reminds me of [coinpools](https://github.com/coinpool-dev/paper/blob/master/coinpool-v0.1.pdf). I'm not super up to speed with either approach tbh but the motivation is similar at least. PathCoin doesn't seem to require a soft fork, but I'd guess it scales factorially which is kind of what coinpool's soft forks aim to prevent.

*Edit: yep, seems to be the case if you aren't pre-signing some subset of possible paths*

> It's certainly possible to try to construct a (yet more complex) version of PathCoin that allows multiple different paths amongst the same set of participants, but note that the number of paths is factorial in *N*, hence this is only even worth considering for very small numbers of participants (<=10 probably).