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The difficulty is that once you move from things like my joke solution to earnest attempts like yours you start involving the real world in your model, and you

The difficulty is that once you move from things like my joke solution to earnest attempts like yours you start involving the real world in your model, and you end up with something that is more like a social solution than a technological one. Once you start talking social solutions you start looking more like a business or a commune or a community and less like a technology. You don't just have algorithms and widgets and cryptographic hashes, you have people who are supposed to execute fuzzy decision making processes like authenticating that someone "did good work", and then you need validation protocols to check whether people are executing their human-algorithms correctly, and identity and spam systems to ensure that someone isn't running a bot-net that simulates a town of people pretending to do useful work... Which in addition to making everything way more complicated, makes you step back and say, "Wait, what am I trying to accomplish here by creating a cryptocurrency which is a currency and not a speculation-vehicle again? And why am I trying to do it by creating a cryptocurrency again?"

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
Oh yeah, it gets messier for sure, and I think that providing the protocols is probably the smaller part of it. Teaching people to use them is probably harder. But the benefits of taking on those challenges strike me as too big to ignore. As for the botnet thing, I really like how CirclesUBI handles it. "Trust" is a pact to treat tokens minted for the other party as indistinguishable from tokens minted for yourself. So by all means, go simulate a small town doing "useful" work. Nobody is going to value the fruits of that labor unless they've seen them, and so your tokens will be worthless. Once you have the base web of trust set up, you can layer other types of trust on top of it, like returns-borrowed-tools-undamaged trust and other things that lower the cost of doing business. It's about using technology to take things that already work (cooperation) and make them work at scale (1000 people instead of 10). No need for global consistency, the resources are all local anyway. As for being called a commune, that's fine. Communism allegedly doesn't work, so the idea that people might be doing this in tandem with traditional economics ought to be considered "not-a-threat" except in cases where traditional economics produces exceptionally troublesome outcomes.
imtringued 5y ago
To be fair there is some residual demand for a sort of "law of physics" namely a basic mechanism that forcibly applies to everyone. We use paper notes to signify that we owe the holder of the paper note work. The paper note follows the law of physics in the sense that it is a physical object that can be transferred from person to person. The issuance of paper notes is still a social problem but the act of exchanging them at a shop is not.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

Oh yeah, it gets messier for sure, and I think that providing the protocols is probably the smaller part of it. Teaching people to use them is probably harder. But the benefits of taking on those challenges strike me as too big to ignore. As for the botnet thing, I really like how CirclesUBI handles it. "Trust" is a pact to treat tokens minted for the other party as indistinguishable from tokens minted for yourself. So by all means, go simulate a small town doing "useful" work. Nobody is going to value the fruits of that labor unless they've seen them, and so your tokens will be worthless. Once you have the base web of trust set up, you can layer other types of trust on top of it, like returns-borrowed-tools-undamaged trust and other things that lower the cost of doing business. It's about using technology to take things that already work (cooperation) and make them work at scale (1000 people instead of 10). No need for global consistency, the resources are all local anyway. As for being called a commune, that's fine. Communism allegedly doesn't work, so the idea that people might be doing this in tandem with traditional economics ought to be considered "not-a-threat" except in cases where traditional economics produces exceptionally troublesome outcomes.

imtringued 5y ago

To be fair there is some residual demand for a sort of "law of physics" namely a basic mechanism that forcibly applies to everyone. We use paper notes to signify that we owe the holder of the paper note work. The paper note follows the law of physics in the sense that it is a physical object that can be transferred from person to person. The issuance of paper notes is still a social problem but the act of exchanging them at a shop is not.