Comment by spaceapple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceapple | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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