6 ms·

A New Digital Currency Whose Value Is Based on Your Reputation

57 points by cjdulberger 12y ago

jchrisa 12y ago
Hey, Chris Anderson here, this article is about my project. Here are slides from my Open Source Bridge talk on the subject. First half is philosophy the second half is tech: https://speakerdeck.com/jchris/subjective-crypto-currency https://speakerdeck.com/jchris/subjective-crypto-currency
- rdl 12y ago
  Perhaps you should rename it "whuffie".
  - chadgeidel 12y ago
    This is the first thing I thought of. For those that haven't read the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingd...
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    Down and Out is a good one, I also like http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money I think there is something problematic about those stories, mostly because they insist on making reputation into a single scalar value.
    - blazespin 12y ago
      Agreed, your improvement is important.
- zz1 12y ago
  Looked at the slides, I kind of undestand something now, and it looks intriguing if not really interesting. Have you thought about key revocation, how is it handled?
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    No it's hard and could lead to sad stories. Say your phone holds a few wallets and a hacker breaks in a starts double spending. That would ruin those wallets and I guess there are simpler cases like you just lost your wallet / forgot your password that might be as troubling. So key handling is totally one of those things I'd love to outsource. Actually please let me outsource as much of of the crypto as possible, I don't want to be inventing things. To that end http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/ http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/ looks like a reasonable start. I've also been reading http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jose-cookbook/ http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jose-cookbook/ and generally trying to get a sense of the least opinionated path I can take. Luckily our iOS lead at Couchbase is experienced writing apps that use cryptographic signing, so he's written up the beginnings of a spec that we'll likely evolve: https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios/wiki/Signed-Documents https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios/wiki/Signed-... If you want to join in the implementation nitty gritty feel free to start a thread in our group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase I've always used my own application development goals to find interesting directions at Couchbase so this project is just an example of how we work.
    - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
      my friend and i have been working on something like this, which may have the answer to the key revocation problem. in our system (which we are calling dewdrop - https://github.com/neyer/dewdrop https://github.com/neyer/dewdrop - still very much a work in progress) you don't pass coins around; you make statements. you can make statements of the form 'i trust person X', and then statements made by person X are given more weight for you, as are statements by those X trusts, etc. in our system, key revocation would be just another statement. if i say "hey this is mark, my phone was captured at this time and these N transactions are invalid", my friends - if they believe me - can say 'i believe he is telling the truth here.' everyone who trusts us will then ignore statements made from that address during that time period. the statements will still be on the network, but people who trust me and my friends will not believe i made them. because there is no transfer of coins - just statements that anyone can make - there's no issue of 'do we really need to revoke the key?' people who trust me, and who trust my friends, will see those statements as having been revoked; people who don't trust me will need to decide for themselves on this.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Thanks for chiming in. I find it easy to conveice of a multidimensional reputation, eg your HN karma encapsulates one vector, the number of upvotes on Reddit or some special-interest forum another, and so forth. The bit I don't fully understand right now is how you approach convertibility. Say I'm into motorcycles, and I am a regular at motorcycle-forums.com where I dispense helpful advice on everything from tire pressure to tappets. Over time I deservedly acquire a reputation as That Helpful Guy, and the grateful votes of other users accumulate. One day I decide I want a new bike, and head over to the marketplace subforum to purchase one. Turns out that Alica has just the bike I want! Naturally I want to use my accrued Biker Points to get a discount. Now, in a closed economy. Alice might be delighted to have my BP - she could trade them for other goods and services with other bikers, and there might even be a social value in having dealt with me (a good few specialist websites maintain informal 'trusted buyer/seller' lists which saves members money vs. low-trust high-fee markets like eBay). But what if Alice is done with biking and just wants to get rid of her Vroomatic 5000 so she can take up windsurfing or something? My BP will be of little use to her on the ocean wave, and there may not be enough transitional activity between the Biker and surfer communitites to establish a maingful rate of exchange, so instead you end up with a bunch of shady pseudocurrencies, sort of like penny stocks. One way I can see it working is if quality websites charge a small joining or membership fee and a portion of that constitutes an initial pool of points. Alternatively, a portion of ad revenue might be convertible into points, as those members who consistently make valuable and informative contributions are a key part of the site's draw, so it makes sense for the operator to subsidize the most 'productive' members. I may have got completely the wrong end of the stick here, and you only meant to substitute reputation for cryptographic proof-of-work, but I'm guessing form your slides about inequality and different concepts of value that you're looking to examine the notion of wealth in more subjective contexts, rather than just authentication.
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    Yes the notion is that we can throw away the idea that everyone must be ranked on a single number line. Instead each person would see their own view of who is wealthy, who is reputable, who is a hard worker, etc etc. And depending on my values, I might disagree with your view of a particular person. So the currency is meant to reflect that.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  This is almost exactly the same idea that I had - it may differ in specifics, but they map to the same thing, so I'd be interested in following the progress of its design. Have you thought of the possibility that, for example, universities could issue coins to their graduates, and scientists could issue them to papers they have reviewed (and the value, in that case, could well be the actual review)?
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    Coins can really be any data, issued by anyone. So they can almost be thought of as contracts in some cases, assertions in another. When the video of my talk is up you'll see that comes up in the Q/A. Part of the reason I'm being late-binding about the technical implementation is because I know I haven't come up with anything exactly new. I've been working a long time to solve the database sync problem, and now that we shipped, I'm thinking about what we can build on top of it. Which particular key scheme we use is of secondary importance, the important thing for me is exposing crypto primitives as part of a distributed database.
- kaoD 12y ago
  From the article and the slides, I imagine these as p2p federal tradeable karma points. Did I get the big picture?
- facepalm 12y ago
  I am a bit floored because it sounds like a thing I have been thinking about (floored because with your credentials, you are much more likely to succeed than I am :-) ). I would have called it LikeCoin. My starting point is that likes have some value. A baker might give you some bread in exchange for a Facebook like. However, that would only work once or twice - the more you spend it, the more it loses in value. On the other hand, the more followers you have, the more valuable your likes are. I just thought that could be modeled into a coin without the dreaded "double spending" risk - double spending would be no problem, because everybody could create as many "coins" as they want anyway. But they would have to worry about inflation if they create too many coins...
abruzzi 12y ago
To be honest, I don't really get what this is for. Everybody I buy things from, and everybody that buys things from me, has no idea who I am. I don't know who they are either. I'm not "famous" so no stranger is going to afford me any "reputation", and I intentionally have zero financial interaction with people I know. (money and friendship don't go together in my opinion.)
- jchrisa 12y ago
  Part of the idea is the commercial relationships you have, while being fairly weak, are also a pretty good proof that you are a person and not a bot. So spending coins provides a different kind of basis for public key trustworthiness. Which when combined with the higher trust activity of minting coins with your friends, could make maybe a deeper way to map identity to public keys.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Where does privacy fit into the philosophy and tech?
    - jchrisa 12y ago
      Short answer is I hope coins are shareable but that there's no requirement to run them through any central authority. So they disclose information in exchange for not privileging a particular party. Edit: it should be possible to write an app that works only locally on the phone via p2p sync, with no central server, that collects public signatures from friend-of-a-friend wallets, that can provide a decent reach if there were ever a critical mass of users. Opening the possibility to have a functioning trust network without needing everyone to see everyone's coins.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    A cluster of bots could easily have a lot of spending acitivty going on. Is there any compensation for closed loops in the economy? What would the risk of false positives look like?
powera 12y ago
The last paragraph of the article, literally verbatim: If it does take off, it will probably start small. It’s not hard to picture groups of friends using it to create custom coins based on inside jokes. Anderson says there would actually be a big benefit in the system being used in this way, since it would get people to create and maintain public encryption keys, setting the stage for more interesting uses later on. “Everything has to start out as a joke these days,” he says. “Otherwise people won’t take them seriously.”
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  literally verbatim Seems like you have some duplicative redundancy going on there...
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    I've reported the incident to the Department of Redundancy Department.
drcode 12y ago
I wish you good luck with your project, but your materials so far skirt over the difficult problems (collusion, botnets, etc) and just discuss the easy parts of building this type of system. Nonetheless, good luck, there's definitely a market for a quality product in the niche.
- jchrisa 12y ago
  What I like about the reaction so far is that folks get what I'm going for, even with such a vague short description. I bet multiple engineering teams all starting from just the stuff published so far would come out not too far from each other. I think the Sibyl attack is blunted by the idea that this system is designed to bootstrap from face to face interactions.
blazespin 12y ago
Incredible incredible stuff. It will be so massively niche for such a long time, so you must have faith, but if you do, one day it will be very very huge.
Eliezer 12y ago
Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I can't tell whether this is just a case of the journalist not understanding what properties make for a good unit of exchange, or if the actual creator of the currency has never heard of the Law of One Price! But we should always suspect the journalist first because they have poorer incentives! Let me know if there's any link explaining what the point of this currency really is! Sincerely, the Market Economics Fairy!
- kaoD 12y ago
  Hi! Even though you have a great point there, snarkiness is usually frowned upon in Hacker News. I'd also like to point out that, even if it's called a Law, it isn't a Law (especially since there's an intent to challenge our notion of currency here).
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > snarkiness is usually frowned upon in Hacker News Hey! Give it a pass; the Market Economics Fairy has been with us here for a long time, and usually has some insightful things to say ;). Sincerely, Random HN'er who likes that style.
- jchrisa 12y ago
  I'm aware of the fairy maybe you'd enjoy http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-introduction/ http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-introduction/
  - Eliezer 12y ago
    Skimming three chapters reveals no sign that the author of the above book knows first-year undergraduate economics, why the current economy is arranged the way it is, or what policy tradeoffs would be involved in their hopeful ideas. May I recommend to you the standard introductory text Intermediate Microeconomics by Hal Varian, which I recently gave to a friend of mine?
    - 12y ago
rbobby 12y ago
For each person's coin I hold if that person goes "off the rails" then would the value of any of their coins that I hold depreciate (possibly to 0)? If yes, then how do you protect yourself from folks like Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Madoff, Mel Gibson, Rob Ford, OJ Simpson... and so forth?
- jchrisa 12y ago
  You got it. Coins value is totally subjective. So even junk coins might be interesting in aggregate.
xn 12y ago
How is this different from Ripple?
jchrisa 12y ago
Here is a deeper look. Not quite a spec, but a step in the direction of a spec. So that folks can understand more precisely what I'm doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNvU-ggBJ_Z-FNg0DZIA_c https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNv...

57 points by cjdulberger 12y ago

Hey, Chris Anderson here, this article is about my project. Here are slides from my Open Source Bridge talk on the subject. First half is philosophy the second half is tech: https://speakerdeck.com/jchris/subjective-crypto-currency https://speakerdeck.com/jchris/subjective-crypto-currency

rdl 12y ago
Perhaps you should rename it "whuffie".
- chadgeidel 12y ago
  This is the first thing I thought of. For those that haven't read the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingd...
- jchrisa 12y ago
  Down and Out is a good one, I also like http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money I think there is something problematic about those stories, mostly because they insist on making reputation into a single scalar value.
  - blazespin 12y ago
    Agreed, your improvement is important.
zz1 12y ago
Looked at the slides, I kind of undestand something now, and it looks intriguing if not really interesting. Have you thought about key revocation, how is it handled?
- jchrisa 12y ago
  No it's hard and could lead to sad stories. Say your phone holds a few wallets and a hacker breaks in a starts double spending. That would ruin those wallets and I guess there are simpler cases like you just lost your wallet / forgot your password that might be as troubling. So key handling is totally one of those things I'd love to outsource. Actually please let me outsource as much of of the crypto as possible, I don't want to be inventing things. To that end http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/ http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/ looks like a reasonable start. I've also been reading http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jose-cookbook/ http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jose-cookbook/ and generally trying to get a sense of the least opinionated path I can take. Luckily our iOS lead at Couchbase is experienced writing apps that use cryptographic signing, so he's written up the beginnings of a spec that we'll likely evolve: https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios/wiki/Signed-Documents https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios/wiki/Signed-... If you want to join in the implementation nitty gritty feel free to start a thread in our group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase I've always used my own application development goals to find interesting directions at Couchbase so this project is just an example of how we work.
  - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
    my friend and i have been working on something like this, which may have the answer to the key revocation problem. in our system (which we are calling dewdrop - https://github.com/neyer/dewdrop https://github.com/neyer/dewdrop - still very much a work in progress) you don't pass coins around; you make statements. you can make statements of the form 'i trust person X', and then statements made by person X are given more weight for you, as are statements by those X trusts, etc. in our system, key revocation would be just another statement. if i say "hey this is mark, my phone was captured at this time and these N transactions are invalid", my friends - if they believe me - can say 'i believe he is telling the truth here.' everyone who trusts us will then ignore statements made from that address during that time period. the statements will still be on the network, but people who trust me and my friends will not believe i made them. because there is no transfer of coins - just statements that anyone can make - there's no issue of 'do we really need to revoke the key?' people who trust me, and who trust my friends, will see those statements as having been revoked; people who don't trust me will need to decide for themselves on this.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Thanks for chiming in. I find it easy to conveice of a multidimensional reputation, eg your HN karma encapsulates one vector, the number of upvotes on Reddit or some special-interest forum another, and so forth. The bit I don't fully understand right now is how you approach convertibility. Say I'm into motorcycles, and I am a regular at motorcycle-forums.com where I dispense helpful advice on everything from tire pressure to tappets. Over time I deservedly acquire a reputation as That Helpful Guy, and the grateful votes of other users accumulate. One day I decide I want a new bike, and head over to the marketplace subforum to purchase one. Turns out that Alica has just the bike I want! Naturally I want to use my accrued Biker Points to get a discount. Now, in a closed economy. Alice might be delighted to have my BP - she could trade them for other goods and services with other bikers, and there might even be a social value in having dealt with me (a good few specialist websites maintain informal 'trusted buyer/seller' lists which saves members money vs. low-trust high-fee markets like eBay). But what if Alice is done with biking and just wants to get rid of her Vroomatic 5000 so she can take up windsurfing or something? My BP will be of little use to her on the ocean wave, and there may not be enough transitional activity between the Biker and surfer communitites to establish a maingful rate of exchange, so instead you end up with a bunch of shady pseudocurrencies, sort of like penny stocks. One way I can see it working is if quality websites charge a small joining or membership fee and a portion of that constitutes an initial pool of points. Alternatively, a portion of ad revenue might be convertible into points, as those members who consistently make valuable and informative contributions are a key part of the site's draw, so it makes sense for the operator to subsidize the most 'productive' members. I may have got completely the wrong end of the stick here, and you only meant to substitute reputation for cryptographic proof-of-work, but I'm guessing form your slides about inequality and different concepts of value that you're looking to examine the notion of wealth in more subjective contexts, rather than just authentication.
- jchrisa 12y ago
  Yes the notion is that we can throw away the idea that everyone must be ranked on a single number line. Instead each person would see their own view of who is wealthy, who is reputable, who is a hard worker, etc etc. And depending on my values, I might disagree with your view of a particular person. So the currency is meant to reflect that.
pessimizer 12y ago
This is almost exactly the same idea that I had - it may differ in specifics, but they map to the same thing, so I'd be interested in following the progress of its design. Have you thought of the possibility that, for example, universities could issue coins to their graduates, and scientists could issue them to papers they have reviewed (and the value, in that case, could well be the actual review)?
- jchrisa 12y ago
  Coins can really be any data, issued by anyone. So they can almost be thought of as contracts in some cases, assertions in another. When the video of my talk is up you'll see that comes up in the Q/A. Part of the reason I'm being late-binding about the technical implementation is because I know I haven't come up with anything exactly new. I've been working a long time to solve the database sync problem, and now that we shipped, I'm thinking about what we can build on top of it. Which particular key scheme we use is of secondary importance, the important thing for me is exposing crypto primitives as part of a distributed database.
kaoD 12y ago
From the article and the slides, I imagine these as p2p federal tradeable karma points. Did I get the big picture?
facepalm 12y ago
I am a bit floored because it sounds like a thing I have been thinking about (floored because with your credentials, you are much more likely to succeed than I am :-) ). I would have called it LikeCoin. My starting point is that likes have some value. A baker might give you some bread in exchange for a Facebook like. However, that would only work once or twice - the more you spend it, the more it loses in value. On the other hand, the more followers you have, the more valuable your likes are. I just thought that could be modeled into a coin without the dreaded "double spending" risk - double spending would be no problem, because everybody could create as many "coins" as they want anyway. But they would have to worry about inflation if they create too many coins...

abruzzi 12y ago

To be honest, I don't really get what this is for. Everybody I buy things from, and everybody that buys things from me, has no idea who I am. I don't know who they are either. I'm not "famous" so no stranger is going to afford me any "reputation", and I intentionally have zero financial interaction with people I know. (money and friendship don't go together in my opinion.)

jchrisa 12y ago
Part of the idea is the commercial relationships you have, while being fairly weak, are also a pretty good proof that you are a person and not a bot. So spending coins provides a different kind of basis for public key trustworthiness. Which when combined with the higher trust activity of minting coins with your friends, could make maybe a deeper way to map identity to public keys.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Where does privacy fit into the philosophy and tech?
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    Short answer is I hope coins are shareable but that there's no requirement to run them through any central authority. So they disclose information in exchange for not privileging a particular party. Edit: it should be possible to write an app that works only locally on the phone via p2p sync, with no central server, that collects public signatures from friend-of-a-friend wallets, that can provide a decent reach if there were ever a critical mass of users. Opening the possibility to have a functioning trust network without needing everyone to see everyone's coins.
- xorcist 12y ago
  A cluster of bots could easily have a lot of spending acitivty going on. Is there any compensation for closed loops in the economy? What would the risk of false positives look like?

powera 12y ago

The last paragraph of the article, literally verbatim: If it does take off, it will probably start small. It’s not hard to picture groups of friends using it to create custom coins based on inside jokes. Anderson says there would actually be a big benefit in the system being used in this way, since it would get people to create and maintain public encryption keys, setting the stage for more interesting uses later on. “Everything has to start out as a joke these days,” he says. “Otherwise people won’t take them seriously.”

anigbrowl 12y ago
literally verbatim Seems like you have some duplicative redundancy going on there...
- dllthomas 12y ago
  I've reported the incident to the Department of Redundancy Department.

drcode 12y ago

I wish you good luck with your project, but your materials so far skirt over the difficult problems (collusion, botnets, etc) and just discuss the easy parts of building this type of system. Nonetheless, good luck, there's definitely a market for a quality product in the niche.

jchrisa 12y ago
What I like about the reaction so far is that folks get what I'm going for, even with such a vague short description. I bet multiple engineering teams all starting from just the stuff published so far would come out not too far from each other. I think the Sibyl attack is blunted by the idea that this system is designed to bootstrap from face to face interactions.

blazespin 12y ago

Incredible incredible stuff. It will be so massively niche for such a long time, so you must have faith, but if you do, one day it will be very very huge.

Eliezer 12y ago

Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I can't tell whether this is just a case of the journalist not understanding what properties make for a good unit of exchange, or if the actual creator of the currency has never heard of the Law of One Price! But we should always suspect the journalist first because they have poorer incentives! Let me know if there's any link explaining what the point of this currency really is! Sincerely, the Market Economics Fairy!

kaoD 12y ago
Hi! Even though you have a great point there, snarkiness is usually frowned upon in Hacker News. I'd also like to point out that, even if it's called a Law, it isn't a Law (especially since there's an intent to challenge our notion of currency here).
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > snarkiness is usually frowned upon in Hacker News Hey! Give it a pass; the Market Economics Fairy has been with us here for a long time, and usually has some insightful things to say ;). Sincerely, Random HN'er who likes that style.
jchrisa 12y ago
I'm aware of the fairy maybe you'd enjoy http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-introduction/ http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-introduction/
- Eliezer 12y ago
  Skimming three chapters reveals no sign that the author of the above book knows first-year undergraduate economics, why the current economy is arranged the way it is, or what policy tradeoffs would be involved in their hopeful ideas. May I recommend to you the standard introductory text Intermediate Microeconomics by Hal Varian, which I recently gave to a friend of mine?
  - 12y ago

rbobby 12y ago

For each person's coin I hold if that person goes "off the rails" then would the value of any of their coins that I hold depreciate (possibly to 0)? If yes, then how do you protect yourself from folks like Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Madoff, Mel Gibson, Rob Ford, OJ Simpson... and so forth?

jchrisa 12y ago
You got it. Coins value is totally subjective. So even junk coins might be interesting in aggregate.

xn 12y ago

How is this different from Ripple?

jchrisa 12y ago

Here is a deeper look. Not quite a spec, but a step in the direction of a spec. So that folks can understand more precisely what I'm doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNvU-ggBJ_Z-FNg0DZIA_c https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNv...