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.

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.