siosonel

A team's reputation does not need to involve divulging personal information about its members. Although, if a team is small enough, there's a good chance that generalized transactions reported between teams may still be matched to a particular team member.

The bigger picture is that a team in the proposed system would not have to constantly worry about funding, since it could use its budgets directly as currency as long as the team maintains its reputation. I think that for most participants that is more than good enough trade-off to take on small privacy risk. In other words, would a team rather worry about funding or privacy, and with good platform design those concerns might not even be mutually exclusive in most cases.

With regards to not having access to reputation data from online applications, there are work-arounds. For example, tweets, blog posts, or product reviews about a team could be crawled for sentiment detection and used in reputation metric calculations. These work-arounds might seem difficult to do, but so was search engine technology in the early days of the web.

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?

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 had to dig a bit which founder you were referring to. No controversy here, but just want to give a background: I always think of Ryan Fugger as the person who initially proposed the network of IOUs idea and used the name Ripple for it, and later on worked with Jed McCaleb's team who implemented Ripple as it's known today. [1]

Just amazing how alt-currency/alt-payment ideas have grown so much from being on the fringe to more or less widely accepted. It was hard to imagine back in 2006 how these ideas would finally take off.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rippleusers/IVin3Qwrp7k/urza...

The approach I prefer is to let each market participant or team decide which reputation engine they want to use when evaluating a payment offer. So there does not have to be a global consensus on what reputation engine everyone should use.

I have prototyped a reputation currency platform [1] where third-party 'advisor' applications offer real-time advisory on whether a payment recipient should approve or reject a payment offer. Data science/big data techniques would help improve and adapt such reputation engines over time, much like web search engines improving incrementally over time.

[1] https://tatag.cc/ui/home-about

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.)

I think the best way to address the issue of how reputations are determined is to let "sellers" or payment recipients decide on who they want to benefit from their goods and services.

So, in the digital currency system that I have prototyped [1], each team decides on which recommender system they want to provide advise, in real-time, on whether to accept or reject a payment offer from another team. Borrowing from your examples, one team could use an "advisor" developed by the HN staff, another team could use an "advisor" endorsed by the subculture you identify with, etc.

There are many issues that I have worked out in the prototype, such as making sure payments are always traceable to the issuer and inflation is decentrally regulated, and most of the solution comes from the budgets-as-currency approach. I'm still in the process of improving the advisor options with better data-science techniques (hopefully with contributions from others). [2]

[1] https://tatag.cc/ui/home-about [2] https://github.com/siosonel/tatag-api

Thanks for the clarification. I think by "central bank", the article just meant a non-decentralized currency system.

It's good that you pointed out the possibility for scores to go down in that system, and I assume that would affect the ability of low scoring participants to transact in the system. If that's the case, it makes me doubt the article's strong assertion regarding that example of a reputation currency.

You might be interested in this idea of routing payments through a trust network, http://p2pfoundation.net/Ripple.

I'm just a curious onlooker and not directly involved with the idea, but there is a blockchain related implementation at https://ripple.com/, and other implementations of the original idea at https://classic.ripplepay.com/ and https://villages.cc/.

"... Citizen Scores are a near-perfect expression of reputation economics: like most other forms of currency, they are issued by a central bank that uses them to try and influence social outcomes."

It seems to me, and I could have misread, that the biggest problem with the examples of currency systems in the article is that the 'pooled' currencies are unquestionably accepted by participants. Take that guarantee away, and someone could design a reputation currency where participants could reject payments from disreputable participants. In which case accumulation of units does not imply the long-term ability to use them; instead, there will be a long-term incentive for participants to maintain a good reputation.

See this overview of a counter-example to the article's point, a reputation currency system without a central issuer: https://tatag.cc/ui/home-about. (Disclaimer: I'm the developer of the linked site.)

Tatag is platform that (1) guarantees a team's funding via its planned budgets and (2) encourages market participants to refuse payments from disreputable teams. This approach inverts the typical dynamic of competing for scarce funding that are blindly accepted by payment recipients.

Any and all feedback are welcome.

Simple, appropriate, low tech solution for the sewer issue - sawdust toilet: http://humanurehandbook.com/humanure_toilet.html