Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency | Hacker News Reader

Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

digitalinterface.blogspot.com

113 pointsdjestrada65 comments

'Basic income' which is not coupled to any expenditure (e.g. by mining) will have a tragedy of the commons problem in a pseudonymous system.

In a pseudonymous system, I can make as many addresses / accounts as I like (since a pseudonym is, by definition, not tied to any real identity).

Therefore, to maximise income, someone can create duplicate addresses, causing the basic income to be distributed according to the number of addresses a person has.

While this is a valid objection to the design as stated, there are solutions. For instance, the insight behind Bitcoin is that instead of the one-IP-one-vote policies of previous distributed protocols and the sock-puppeting that ensues, proof of work means that it's one-CPU-one-vote. And schemes like proof of stake go even further so it's one-coin-one-vote.

Bitcoin already has a basic income distributed via one-CPU-one-vote: it's called a mining reward. And if you distribute a basic income via one-coin-one-vote it's called an interest rate. The whole point of BI is to be per-person.

djestrada 2 hours ago | link [dead]

Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm

> I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.

Ah, so he's counting on the scarcity of the 'external' account balance (eg. Dollars) to keep people from cheating? But if there are dividends to be made which are proportional to # of Strangecoin accounts, not just the wealth flowing through them, it seems people could cheat that system.

I think some level of verification should happen to limit people from gaming the system.

Or...did he mean there would be a master Strangecoin account that must be verified and sub-accounts could be pseudonymous?

More, I think, that while you may be able to create yourself a clique of accounts, artificially inflating the number of users, that clique will have no more links to accounts outside the clique than you would have if you only had a single account. Since your basic income depends on your interaction with the rest of the network, not just with your clique, you wouldn't gain any global advantage.

Where is the part that says that “your basic income depends on your interaction with the rest of the network”?

What is the motivation for this?

The big advantage of money is as a communication mechanism: An increase of demand of pencils, though price chnges, can increase the demand for burgers in a town where the wood for said pencils is made, even though the purchasers have absolutely no idea, and no control, over the results of their actions.

Sending positive and negative feedback to transactions has the opposite effect: It avoids the information hiding that is the key to making the economy tractable, and makes what are simple decisions much more complicated, but I suddenly have to care about what people think about the suppliers of my suppliers.

I suspect a economy running on this strangecoin would be less effective than one running on a regular currency, just like it's much harder to be gay in a tiny homophobic town than in a large, relatively anonymous big city.

Traditional money makes certain features of the economic system tractable, but it masks other important relationships that constraint its behavior. The question isn't whether or not the the transactions should be shaped by feedback from the network; the question instead is which features of the economic network do we want to make salient to agents in that network.

You might think of Strangecoin as a way of making features of the interdependence of economic relationships salient in each transaction. In the parlance of STDs, I'm not just trading with you, I'm trading with everyone else you are trading with.

I'm not sure I understand your analogy to small homophobic towns, but I suppose you mean that people with less economic support will have less representation in Strangecoin. It's true that Strangecoin will be disposed to preferential attachment, but I'm not sure any economic system wouldn't. It's a feature of the system that it makes these attachment relations explicit, a feature of the existing economy that is completely masked over with traditional money.

I think Strangecoin is super interesting. I think his analogy was that with a coin where relationships matter, you have to care how a person is connected, when you deal with them. I think it could be a feature, not a bug, even if it makes things less efficient.

Efficiency isn't some absolute value. Efficiency is always relative to the goals we have.

Well, it can be either depending on the perspective you are using at the time: objective or subjective. Some kinds of efficiency hew more to the former and some to the latter. In the last few thousand years money has done more than perhaps anything else to generate macro-economic efficiencies. So much so that it's hard to now imagine that it might be time for alternatives.

I was always dispirited by how conservative in sentiment Bitcoin and most altcoins were. It always felt to me that Bitcoin was mostly redundant to gold, neglecting the inherent advantages of ecurrency. Something more ambitious deserves to be implemented.

That endorsement aside, the inhibition transaction does disturb me. It would seem to encourage mob-like behavior in the culture of early adopters, as heretics of whatever sort were forcibly ejected from the system. I don't trust the dynamics of groups enough to think this will be a good form of self government.

Inhibition is a two-sided transaction, requiring the consent of both sides.

In the transactions I describe, inhibition is a two-sided transaction, meaning it requires approval from both parties. Presumably parties won't enter into such transactions without good reason for consent.

Given the number of people confused by it, I think perhaps it needs a different name ... my mind is blank when I attempt to come up with a better one, though.

> I was always dispirited by how conservative in sentiment Bitcoin and most altcoins were. It always felt to me that Bitcoin was mostly redundant to gold, neglecting the inherent advantages of ecurrency. Something more ambitious deserves to be implemented.

There is a good reason Bitcoin is conservative: it has to be, by design. It's also what makes it attractive.

Also, you are completely wrong if you think that lack of ambition is the reason we don't have a cryptocurrency that doesn't neglect "the inherent advantages of ecurrency" by now. Lots of smart people, including esteemed computer scientists, have been thinking really hard about the subject for years and I find your comment a bit insulting towards them (I'll pass it off as ignorance on your part). I too really hope we can eventually come up with a better cryptocurrency but please don't assume people are not trying.

I'm rather disappointed that in spite of promises that transactions can be non-zero sum, on close inspection these transactions just draw money from other accounts - usually TUA. From the description, I expected new Strangecoins to be created out of thin air by transactions, and I wanted to see where you were going with that design.

If money's still just flowing from accounts into other accounts, then it's something that would be doable with dollars or Bitcoins if the people involved signed appropriate contracts. Some of your proposed transactions have real-world equivalents; "coupling" sounds like creating a joint account for a married couple. Others, like "inhibition", I don't understand their motivation.

What's Strangecoin for, exactly? Are you supposed to be buying goods and services with it? Why have features like continuous-time transactions or free money for all, what benefit is gained from them?

Other comments suggest that this can be implemented with existing tools, which I take as a virtue of the proposal.

In any case, John von Neumann proved a long time ago that any nonzero sum game with n players can be modeled as a zero sum game with n+1 players, where the n+1 player represents the global state. TUA is simply an implementation of this proof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Extensions

I tried to explain inhibition in another comment in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496858

I give an an analogy in the proposal of the popularity of a celebrity couple being a nonlinear relationship to the popularity of each celebrity individually. I think our intuitive understanding of our social relationships is nonlinear in this way generally, and I think Strangecoin can model those nonlinear relationships well.

So, for instance, I'm imagining a family, spouses, close friends, and so on entering into extended coupling transactions, so that as a community their prosperity rises and falls together. I might also enter into such transactions with certain business with whom I want to couple my activities, and these coupling transactions might serve in lieu of direct billing or payment. A coupling relationship with a business is effectively a contract, but with traditional currency you need the whole legal framework of contracts to support the transaction, and with Strangecoin the transaction is built directly into the currency, and the interface looks almost exactly like a point-of-sale cash transaction.

And I can enter into less serious relationships of varying degrees with other parties. The effect is a way of managing not just financial transactions, but also reputation, investment, and other dynamics social constraints on the economy via the currency itself. Money is memory (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf), but our existing currencies only represent some aspects of our economic activity, and therefore put limits on the memory stored in the economy. A nonlinear coin like Strangecoin can embed that social knowledge in the currency itself, providing a more robust memory framework on which we can conduct our economic transactions.

I only hint at this in the proposal, but I suspect a system like this is required to resolve the twisted legal artifice the corporate veil, because it quantifies explicitly the role individuals have in collective economic activity, and thereby gives a method for explicitly holding persons proportionally responsible (in both credit and blame) for their contributions to that activity.

But I think that's a much more radical proposal than the one I've offered for Strangecoin, and I should probably only be defending that here. =)

I think you might ultimately have to explain and defend these ideas together. Bitcoin proved that a purely digital currency could have value alongside government-issued currencies.

To create a viable Strangecoin network, you'll need to demonstrate how a more cooperative economy can come into being and retain value within a more predatory, zero-sum society, where corrupting your network and exploiting it may yield rewards in US dollars.

>In any case, John von Neumann proved a long time ago that any nonzero sum game with n players can be modeled as a zero sum game with n+1 players, where the n+1 player represents the global state. TUA is simply an implementation of this proof.

It's not quite the same, since TUA can be empty. Unless TUA's balance can be negative, or if it's infinite.

Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum. A Strangecoin transaction might result in both parties having more Strangecoin. Strangecoin transactions can be one-sided and can be conducted entirely by only one party to the transaction.

If I'm reading that correctly, could I give myself infinite StrangeCoin?

Users cannot engage in transactions with themselves. Updated the doc to reflect this.

How would one enforce this?

(Answer, you cannot. So this is not a valid solution to this problem.)

What would you do if I created another address?

This was immediately what I thought of. It would take a very short amount of time for a client to show up which automatically manages and balances your accounts.

author: don't use a url shortener or HN will kill your post. For those who don't have showdead turned on, here was his response:

From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm

@author:

Define the "external network". What keeps a single entity from simulating a network just as large as everyone else combined? At that point, how does one determine which network is the "correct" one, though both are the same size with the exact same connectedness stats?

Thanks! Fixed.

I don't even have to engage in transactions with myself, but create a small cartel that really love each others' transactions. Think of the good old link farm sites from the early days of Google. You pay, and a bunch of positive feedback is provided between sites.

In your case, you could even do the opposite: Pay me and my friends, or we will dislike every transaction you will ever make. Built-in racketeering

> If I'm reading that correctly, could I give myself infinite StrangeCoin?

I don't think it will work with just a single strangecoin, but instead have one strangecoin per user (or more, but at least one strangecoin asset type per user on the network). Then when you issue new shares you're only inflating the supply or your reputation, which might cause a market reaction. Mind you that I am not saying the reaction would be a good or bad thing.

There are many problems. I’ll try to explain two:

> The Universal Account (TUA):

> [...]

> TUA can make a payment only in the following situations:

> [...]

> X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA.

When your wallet is empty, you can continue to make payments! Perhaps you can’t make payments directly, but pay indirectly with the other type of transactions. I suppose this works unless TUA is empty, but in this case TUA will be empty all the time. And there will be a lot of bots trying to empty it just in case.

Most of the transactions can be implemented as a strange Bitcoin/AltCoin wallet: Payment is easy. Support, Endorsement and Coupling are just a matter of sending the correct amount at the correct time. Even the balance cap can be implemented as a voluntary automatic payment. The strange part is the Inhibition transaction.

> Inhibition is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X inhibits Y over t, then X reduces the income or expenses of Y over t by some proportion i. By inhibiting Y, X effectively reduces the impact that Y has on the Strangecoin network by i over t by forfeiting that proportion of income and expense. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and i, which must be approved by Y.

If Y has to approve it, I don’t understand why is there an X there. It can be a 1 side transaction where Y inhibits itself. In Inhibition is bad for Y, then it’s easier to implement using NOP, because nobody would use it.

Good comment.

1) You are correct that the system is designed so that users can make payments and conduct transactions even in the absence of an account balance, without incurring debt. Strangecoin allows users to act as if they have effectively unlimited wealth in terms of access to coin. Nevertheless, Strangecoin allows users to judge differences in influence on the network, so they might evaluate who they want to engage in transactions with, regardless of the account balance each has. So X might want to trade with Y instead of Z, even though both are able to pay the same number of coin individually, because Y's network amplifies the transaction more than Z's, and the better overall support for Y makes the transaction more attractive.

2) You are right that a fundamental constraint on the system is that TUA has an available balance. As I mention in the document, the most important constraint on all users (including TUA) is that their balance remains stable; users want to engage in transactions that will stabilize their overall impact on the network. TUA can adjust certain parameters to ensure a stable, nonzero balance: the basic income most importantly, but perhaps TUA can also adjust individual account caps and set limits on the allowable parameters of other transactions to ensure it has a constant, nonzero balance.

This is how I was imagining TUA being a universal indicator of economic prosperity of the network. If I see my TUA income go down, for instance, I know that means a drop in the overall available funds in TUA, which means the economy overall is offbalance, with more expenses than income. And I see that global property of the network directly in my account balance, and I can use that to act accordingly. Specifically, I know that if I increase my own income (or even hit the balance cap), I'll be helping the overall economy by contributing to the TUA balance.

3) Inhibition seems to be giving people trouble. Being "too rich" isn't normally a problem for people outside of hiphop, which I think is a source of the confusion. But being too rich in Strangecoin could be a bad thing, so I included the transaction type to provide a mechanism for negative feedback. This would be useful for some situations where users are finding it difficult to maintain an stable account, and where scaling back it's overall influence on the network might help promote stability. If I'm making more Strangecoin than I know what to do with, this could be a bad thing for me financially because of the penalties that might accrue, so I might want to enter into inhibiting relationships to ease the pressure of those penalties.

This seems incredibly complex and described in an even more complex way, but I think you could accomplish most of the good from this proposal by having an infinity of potential instruments, issued by individuals, with the market sorting out the meaning -- e.g. PG General Liability IOUs trade independently of rdl general liability ious which trade differently from rdl newproject equity.

This is an interesting economics thought experiment, but I don't see this working simply because it is too complicated.

Virtual currency already has a learning curve that most people haven't gotten used to. Adding strange attractors into the mix certainly isn't going to help.

My idea isn't so much to propose a single solution to the worlds economic problems, but instead to ask: what else might digital currencies do?

I don't know of anything else being proposed that works in a nonlinear way, and I don't know if the idea is even on the table as a possibility. I'm hoping that putting it on the table might give other people who can penetrate the complexity ideas for how to make the system work.

That said, I think the transaction types I list are fair intuitive. When I'm going to make a purchase, I have some options: I can pay a lump sum directly, or I can engage in an extended relationship of support, for which I can specify the duration of time, and the amount of support I'm willing to give it. There's different ways that support might work, but that's the gist.

I agree that truly different crypto-currencies is a very exciting frontier. The distributed block-chain technology has implications far wider than a basic ledger. For example, I'm quite excited by namecoin, a distributed DNS. I share your enthusiasm about extending bitcoin's technology to create a distributed, general-purpose trust network.

However, I am quite confused about strangecoin. Maybe the whole thread is going over my head and I'm lacking an Explain-Like-I'm-Five description of your idea. I'd love to be a supporter, but I don't see how you can build a trust network around something as complicated as this. Could you explain how, even in a vague sense, strangecoin could act as a reputation system?

It seems like bitcoin itself works as a pretty great trust network. Just look at the mess surrounding MtGox: everybody seems to have a clear understanding that MtGox is totally culpable, despite the claims of transaction malleability attacks. Because the block-chain is entirely available for analysis, the financial activity of all organizations can be traced, which can reliably verify trust.

I agree with your first answer. But not the second. Altcoins are an amazing testing ground that help cryptocurrency adoption, innovation, and expansion. This is especially true when "strange attractors" are added into "the mix".

I mean: how many people recently came to crypto through the 'ridiculous' Dogecoin idea? What of the recent national cryptocoin (Auracoin, Spaicoin...) wave? And what about Vertcoin, Namecoin, Devcoin? These were once all thought experiments with "strange attractors". They now exist, and are bringing a LOT of interest and experience to cryptocurrency.

I think the "Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum" idea is flawed. But did I understand correctly: Would this be a cryptocurrency with a money base that expands/disappears as the 'fait value' rate goes up and down? That would be cool!

The way I've written the proposal, the raw quantity of coin doesn't change; all that changes is the rate of exchange across parties. The added value is generated by the network of transactions as an emergent property.

But there's probably other ways to do such a proposal. Again, my main goal is to put an idea like this on the table to see what people do with it.

So would the Strangecoin value be algorithmically controlled in any way to keep it at a constant 'fiat value' exchange rate? i.e. when the 'fait value' goes down, the % of Strangecoin confiscated during a transaction increases? (Fiat value tracked through distributed exchanges' data feeds).

I think it's a brilliant idea, but I don't think people will be motivated to move forward with it without a clearer picture of what they would be creating in the real world.

We are strongly conditioned to try to "capture" value. You are attempting to redefine value in such a way that it is no longer advantageous to "capture" it at the expense of the overall system. But what would it look like in the real world?

It is a genuine challenge to envision real world transactions and a society based on Strangecoin, and even more difficult to come up with a profit motive to create it in the first place. Does a barista "couple" herself to a cafe when she gets a job that pays in Strangecoin? What are the effects of this vs employment as we know it? How does she fare as a result when compared to someone working for dollars with an employment contract?

Money serves many purposes, and one is to create incentives. Often these incentives are coercive. They don't have to be, but there are philosophical as well as technical challenges to overcome. When everyone is acting according to one set of rules, it is difficult to create a competing set of rules without some clearly defined advantage for doing so.

We're talking about values, but I think these are ultimately empirical questions about which system performs better under certain constraints.

I think these empirical questions can be resolved prior to implementation, by modeling the incentive structure of employees operating under traditional payment schemes, and employees operating under coupling transactions under Strangecoin, and then running simulations of the two models. I suspect traditional currencies will perform well under certain assumptions, but also that Strangecoin will perform well under similar assumptions, and may even outperform traditional currencies.

In particular, I suspect that an employee with a coupled Scoin transaction with a business will have a closer relationship with that business, partly because the transaction has direct consequences on every other transaction the user engages in, and (by extension) has a closer association with that employee's identity than another business offering only a weekly paycheck.

Businesses spend lots of money cultivating employee cultures so that they identify with the business, and these aspects of the culture can be more influential on employee motivation and job satisfaction than financial compensation. Strangecoin builds these relationships directly into the transaction, so we might expect it to have similar consequences.

But as I said, I think these are empirical questions that can only be solved from the armchair if that armchair is in front of a computer model simulation.

"Would this be a cryptocurrency with a money base that expands/disappears as the 'fait value' rate goes up and down?"

I've actually been toying with that idea.

More info please ...

The basic sketch is to have a way to feed back information about pricings into the block chain. There are then a few ways to increase/reduce the currency in circulation, some of which involve creating coins and some of which involve shifting incentives for holding coins. Most of what remains, then, is a control theory problem.

My current issue is deciding what should actually be targeted. Targeting a single currency or commodity has most (though not all) of the downsides of just using that currency or commodity more directly. Baskets of goods is one approach. Other statistics are also good candidates, though - stabilizing the mean rate of change across a lot of goods, or the like.

From the article:

"If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. What I've lost you've gained and vice versa, so that the total value between us has not changed after the exchange is over."

I can see how a person would think that, but it's not really correct. If that was true then nobody would have any reason to hold either dollars or burgers or whatever; we'd constantly trade them for one another since they are of literally equal value. Who cares which $10 bill they have in their wallet? Nobody since $10 is $10 is $10. Hell, most people don't even care if it's $10 or 2x $5 or $5 and 5x $1, so long as they don't need singles for the vending machine.

But we don't see that kind of behavior in the economy, which leads us to the conclusion that when people exchange things they're not exchanging things of equal value. They are of nominally equal value, which leads to there being a price. But if they were truly of equal value then the guy selling a burger is making $0 profit (something he is unlikely to do) and the guy buying a burger technically isn't any better off either. Why would two people make an exchange where neither is better off? In aggregate they wouldn't even if there are some exceptional cases where they would.

When people exchange things they are trading something which subjectively to them is of equal or lesser value than the thing they are getting. That also explains why people buy just one burger instead of ALL the burgers. When someone is hungry it shifts their subjective valuation of burgers higher and money lower; once satisfied their preferences shift back to "normal" and they stop buying burgers.

An economy already has value creation "baked in" because when people exchange things they only do so when it increases total satisfaction. People tend not to make trades which decrease satisfaction or merely hold it equal. The transaction cost helps ensure that is the case.

Everything else equal before the trade satisfaction was X, after the trade it was X + Y. Y is the amount of increased satisfaction that prompted one or both parties to engage in the trade. Now obviously someone could argue that Y is negative but that doesn't hold water. People don't buy things that are "too expensive" or "crappy" or whatever you'd like to call it.

I will concede that my argument might seem tautological. I might even agree. In the absence of a third party with a gun I can't see how or why two people would choose to enter into a trade that don't benefit at least one of them, and probably both.

I think that you should have kept reading the article beyond that point. From the article:

Of course, when I give you a dollar for a burger that's not really a zero sum transaction, because otherwise we wouldn't be motivated to enter into the transaction in the first place. I give you a dollar because I want the burger more than I want the dollar, and if you accept the trade it's because you want the dollar more than you want the burger, so in a fair exchange we both feel like we've come out ahead. In other words, there is some additional value in our fair exchange that is not accounted for in the burgers and the dollars alone.

Yeah I did, but the author seems to brush that aside and say "it needs to be accounted for directly" and I would argue that's not necessarily true.

The problem is that I value my first gallon of water every day very highly for drinking. The next gallon also pretty highly for drinking and brushing my teeth. The next two gallons are for cooking and stuff, so they're less precious; the next five gallons for bathing and sanitation; the next 10 for cleaning and washing, etc. All the way down until we get to the market price which in Houston for water that comes out of the tap is $0.01 per gallon.

I think it would be utterly exhausting to list out every subjective value that I place on every thing that I exchange for every transaction of every day. It's something that I can do in my head with very little effort since for many transactions the value/cost delta is high and I don't need to do careful accounting.

One of the great things about money is that it has basically zero transaction cost as compared to bartering which has a substantial either time cost to find the best price, or price cost to find a deal in a short period of time. Engaging in these kinds of nonlinear transactions (if they need to be done honestly) would bring an economy to its knees.

Agreed. In fact, all of the myriad secondary costs and benefits from commerce are already accounted for when you have a market that trades the currencies themselves.

While it's not necessarily true that our exchanges need to account for value in this nonlinear way, I think it's an interesting thought experiment to discuss ways in which our currency can express different aspects of the value of our transactions. I'm not claiming that Strangecoin represents the "true value" of our transactions; I'm simply saying that it's another way to model our economic relations, and looking at the network in this way might reveal salient aspects of the network that are hidden from view with other currencies. So I think Strangecoin really is describing some aspect of our economic relations, and it's a perspective that money often doesn't give you. If you trade me money, I don't know where it came from or what ties it has to the rest of the economy. But if you trade me Strangecoin, the trade itself gives me a picture of your importance and influence on the rest of the economy, and I can use that information to judge the value of the trade we're engaged in.

The low transaction cost of money is partly a result of how deeply embedded it is in our social and institutional practices. I don't think it is an essential feature of money itself; other practices might come to fill similar roles. I would also suggest that the opacity of traditional currencies to certain forms of value also has a crippling effect on our economy. Economics talks about these as "externalities", but they are best understood as values that aren't represented in our trades. I'm not claiming that Strangecoin can capture all externalities, or even that it catches the important ones, but only that it captures some dimension of value that is hidden in traditional currencies.

You're right of course that the reason money has low transaction cost is because it is widely accepted. But that's kind of tautological; if it wasn't widely accepted it wouldn't be money by definition.

In my mind the low transaction cost is a feature in that you can make snap decisions (or in many cases not make them at all) without having to explain yourself.

What I mean is that if I had to itemize every gallon of water, every kilowatt-hour (or watt-hour) of electricity, every cubic foot of natural gas, every byte I upload or download, etc etc etc to come up with their "true" values I wouldn't have enough hours in the day to do 10% of what I normally do.

So I guess my question is this: at what level of granularity is this being proposed? And if it's anything less than "full granularity" why? What I mean is why should utilities be any less valued than phone apps? I need that first gallon of water WAY more than I need Angry Birds, so it seems to me like that needs to be accounted for. But that would be exhausting. I can't see a way for me to take this proposal really seriously AND not simultaneously want to hang myself.

I think it's an interesting idea to be sure, and it's fun to think about. But I really hope I don't have to tell everyone how much I like water or electricity or whatever.

"In the absence of a third party with a gun I can't see how or why two people would choose to enter into a trade that don't benefit at least one of them, and probably both."

Well, at least that they don't both believe will benefit them.

Yeah I think you have to go with the subjective meaning. I don't think you can talk about objective benefits, otherwise things go to hell very quickly. Where do drugs (legal or illegal), alcohol, tobacco, sugary foods, fatty foods, fast cars, hybrids, condoms, birth control pills, church donations, etc all fall?

It really depends on who you are. There's no way to have an objective arbiter who determines what is actually beneficial and what merely seems to be beneficial. At least that I know of. The problem seems intractable to me.

I'm not sure this is a criticism of the proposal, but nothing I've said implicates an objective arbiter of value.

I didn't mean "the value we think they should be deriving." I meant that people can be mistaken (or mislead) about how much they value something even in the short term. If someone thinks they are buying a reliable car and gets a lemon, I think it's more correct to say "they didn't get the value they expected" then "their revealed preferences show they really wanted the lemon".

Ah yes, that makes much more sense.

> If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process.

This is incorrect. I sell a burger because I value it less than your dollar, and you buy a burger because you value it more than one dollar. Win-win. It is a positive sum game, not a zero sum one.

And the article goes on to say that two paragraphs after that line.

If that were true, then surely no-one would ever feel cheated in a transaction, and there would be no such word as "profiteering".

Thanks everyone for a fascinating discussion. I found this thread incredibly productive and encouraging.

If you are interested in developing this idea further, please get in contact on my blog or G+ profile.

http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549669

For what it's worth, that's not me and I'm surprised that someone is already trying to scam on the idea. Lol.

Anyway you could lay out what your talking about with a bunch of examples. Maybe add a section here's the problems with the current systems.

That's numberwang!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com