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Next think you know we'll have a currency exchange of karma points for dollars.

• joshwa 19y ago
  writes business plan
• aneesh 19y ago
  again, you can't do this. it wouldn't work because karma is infinite. the reason a Euro or USD has value is because there is a limited supply of them. if you did fix an exchange rate of karma to USD or whatever currency, you and a friend could just upmod each other's comments to get free money.
  • cstejerean 19y ago
    you don't fix the exchange rate, you let the market determine it. As the amount of karma increases it's possible for a value to decrease. But given how the dollar is doing, who knows what would happen.
    • aneesh 19y ago
      here's a game theoretic explanation of why that's no good: okay, fine, let's have an exchange rate where karma gets less valuable as the amount of total karma increases. then me and my friend will upmod each other 1 karma, because we're each gaining 1 whole karma, but the devaluation we're causing is only losing us a fraction of a karma. With these incentives, everyone will upmod ... and the value of a karma point will tend towards zero.
  • 1gor 19y ago
    >the reason a Euro or USD has value is because there is a limited supply of them. I thought thanks to Bernanke there is unlimited supply of USD.
    • TransientMuse 19y ago
      I'm inclined to agree. Moreover, the US government basically prints money all the time... (in the metaphorical sense)
      • apathy 19y ago
        > (in the metaphorical sense) Literal, as well. Paper money wears out and needs replacing.
  • mixmax 19y ago
    Karma is backed by gold didn't you know?
  • maxwell 19y ago
    I think the present limitation has more to do with the fact that karma is dolled out anonymously, which means there's no way to back up the legitimacy of your earnings from the status of your upvoters. It doesn't matter if karma is infinite, because there are a finite number of socially approved participants. This is why national currencies have value in the first place: because valuable organizations/individuals use them to transfer wealth. Money is just a communications medium, after all. One stuck in a pre-web mentality. Existing web currency manipulation systems are as primitive as a YouTube that only played TV in your web browser. If you make karma transferable and allow negative values (thus creating debt and preventing runaway inflation), you could offer a genuine relativistic currency, in that individuals could back up the worth of their unit independently, without relying on trust in someone else (e.g. the state apparatus).
• rms 19y ago
  I'm ready to sell my account on ebay and donate the proceeds to charity. Apparently karma is very important to some people. I have realized it is just a measure of how much I post here. I'm very curious what the karma->cash conversion rate is. The only reason I haven't put the auction up yet is I feel the rms username is damaged because of my disenfranchisement. If 30 days from the original incident pg won't restore my voting rights, I'll ebay my account anyways.
  • aston 19y ago
    Who would you think would want it? It's kinda tainted goods, no? On the other hand, if you can convince PG you sold it to someone else, he might restore your rights...
    • rms 19y ago
      The username itself is pretty generic. I figure some people would love to have the huge karma number, with or without voting rights. I'd start the auction at $0.01, I'm quite confident it would get some bids, especially with the proceeds going to charity.
      • maxwell 19y ago
        Plus, you get to pose as Stallman.
        • kirubakaran 19y ago
          It would be funny if Stallman himself buys that account on eBay :-)
    • davidw 19y ago
      Or he might simply nuke the account entirely to put the kibosh on that kind of dealing...
      • deleted 19y ago
        [deleted]