As others have said before, the trouble with contemporary karma implementations (like here and on reddit) is that everyone has unlimited upvote potential and it

As others have said before, the trouble with contemporary karma implementations (like here and on reddit) is that everyone has unlimited upvote potential and it doesn't cost anything to post. This means karma totals are more or less "chronocratic" -- those who spend the most time on the site have the loudest voice and those who submit the most invariably have the highest karma. (The only exception seems to be dhh, who has, let's see, 259 points for 18 posts. I can't find pg's post giving the highest per post average stats (SearchYC seems to be down), but dhh's 14.4 is certainly an outlier.) So, I don't think any kind of market using current karma as the currency would work at all. Karma will only start becoming dangerous (in raganwald's sense) when it's transactional and capped, and thus scarce, and thus competitive with national currencies as a wealth proxy.