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Comment by cam_l | Hacker News Reader

Interesting ideas..

..tangentially, why even bother with reputations? The big issue with money based economy is that money is all cleansing. All the shitty things you did to get your money can be forgotten and your money used to buy yourself into a position of power, prestige, or even good standing.

If we could tag money's history of exchange we could maybe avoid the both the issues of reputations (big if obviously). Individual transactions could be judged by the prior history of exchanges. Though this could be used as a proxy for reputation or to construct a reputation, the reputation is not required to complete the transaction as a seller. The seller only needs judge the transaction on the history of the money offered itself.

Ideally this would create a situation where 'clean' currency would progressively become more valuable than 'dirty' currency, encouraging clean wealth creation.

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Relevant web comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3540

I think it's pretty important for money to be fungible. Your idea is intended to solve a very real problem, but I think your proposed solution is worse than the problem.

I agree regarding the importance of fungability, but not all the way. If a majority of reputation engines only advised rejection of payments as offered by the bottom 1% of ranked teams, then 99% of teams would still experience the fungability expectation.

Otherwise, if the reputation engines are too strict, no one would trusts the currency. Too loose, and there is no effective deterence to unsustainable activity. There's an ideal balance to the targeted overall rejection rate among all teams, most likely erring on the side of being too loose (0.5% rejection?), filtering out only the worst of the worst. This targeting to a metric value reminds me of fed actions to indirectly influence the economy, such as with setting interest rates.

I like the idea of being able to reliably track how money was earned or used at the time that it is being offered as payment. However, it seems (to me, at least) that there is no practical way to do this for physical currency notes, for various reasons.

Fortunately, for digital currency there are easier ways to implement such tracking ideas. One approach is for a team to use its planned budgets directly as digital currency. When two teams transact, corresponding amounts of expense and revenue budgets get cancelled, so there is no transfer of currency between teams. Thus, each payment offer is always traceable to the reputation of the team who issued the currency (as budgets).

Illustrated explanations, more details, and a working prototype is available at: https://tatag.cc/ui/. (Disclaimer: I'm the developer of the linked site.)

But how do you prevent teams from creating an endless amount of currency?

Do not accept payments from teams who have budget balances that are way beyond typical. The Tatag platform provides accurate and current summary statistics about the paying team, so a reputation engine could factor those metrics to evaluate the concerns that are important to a payment recipient.

As an aside, traditional systems do not prevent similar situations from happening. You have ultra-wealthy people that are each effectively holding an endless supply of money. Should we not be asking that same question whenever and wherever we see it happen today?

"If we could tag money's history of exchange..."

We could track US Cash: All FRN have unique serial numbers, including codes for which bank issued them.

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