Topic: Reputation Coin _ or the passing of greed ( VS MONEY and ANONYMITY ) (Read 1061 times)

The foundation trilogy is great and I agree that the analogy of their situation to our current one is both interesting and potentially comparable.

If you get to the point where you need beta testers for your idea shoot me a PM I am interested. 

I said to you prior CoinCube, I am thinking on doing with this idea, the same they did with "monopoly". Turning a thesis on a game so it gets marketing and testing at the same time. Basically I will put people and NonPlayerChar on nine colonized stars of a 2d-space with basic sets of skills, resources and random objectives, but with credit forms not money to trade. I already have large parts of this game in java, so I will have only to polish and implement this variable to AI and game-play.

About the increasing importance of the Reputation System proposed. All day long, everyday, there are people posting about the failure of fiat money. Not only on Economics, but on AltCoin and other sub-forums. Some more compassionate others without any clue of the pending disaster, but nevertheless There is truly a need for solution. The problem is that the great majority have no experience nor thinking power to come out with something. As explained on the first post, this is a processing problem. Too many not indexed minds going astray or not producing to the extent they could.

You know, I was reading into AnonMint/iamback/weare... recent posts and thinking about Armstrong Economics. It got my attention that we all have some personal crises going on, well timed ones. Meaningful was our meet. It seems Armstrong represents the Hari Seldon of our age. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series

Times Up.

The fundamental source of the problem is our collective inability to personally track reputations as we form ever larger social groups. This forces us to turn to centralized systems of rules, regulations and reputations to cope. However, such order is innately unstable as any centralized system will be exploited to the maximal degree possible by the sociopaths in the population.

Sociopaths leverage inefficiencies in the social contract to skim rents from honest players. Using the power generated from these rents they further warp the system opening ever larger wounds for their parasitism. Intelligent non sociopaths quickly learn to emulate the sociopaths as this becomes the obvious and most efficient means to achieve material wealth. Eventually the system devolves to the point where a majority are behaving in this manner with foreseeable consequences.

Fractional reserve and debt collapses have occurred throughout history. However, this is possibly only the first manifestation of this human failure. Even if we excised sociopathy from finance and somehow enforced fiscal discipline and sound money my suspicion is that this problem would simply manifest later in history with a different face. There are many areas where decay is currently occurring including weakening of the marital bond, decline of individual responsibility, and ever increasing growth of indoctrination standardized education. Would any of these lead eventually to a collapse if allowed to fester long enough? We have not yet seen that historically but perhaps this is because finance and debt is most easily rotted and the collapse of debt forces a return to basics across the board.

I am skeptical your system will work beyond a small local scale. The driving force here is fundamental human limitation. On a large scale I do not see why your system would not be destroyed by the same forces driving our current decline.

1) This point shows potential system weakness when large scale non-local trades become a trend. It have to be understood that no matter how much local influence One's RC have, the shadow it will cast wont go much further unless he builds his trading bridges to other communities with sustaining trades. If A is local and B non-local, the RC Totals of them could be great, but the influence of their RC on each other would signal little confidence. If they still wanna trade after this it would be smart to get some option on the offer, like insurance by the RC of a local renown group.

Another point checked here relates to the Judiciary. Although the system will have its own ways to do justice, one of its main attributes is to not be hermetic closed system, so peer and group pressure will work as much as the law.

2) One of the must dehumanizing trends in the world today is to try to cast out completely human's wrong doing out of systems. On Code2 Lessig talks about how destructive and dismissive this can be if you are interested on reading more about. In RC system wrong doings can and will occur based on that humans learns from trials and errors. We gonna name it education and count on the different cultures of the different communities to handle it. But it is to be said that a extrapolated use of force would vastly hand the group isolated and poorer because of it.

3) I have to think more about this.

4) Renown could be such a reward. Fast increasing of RC influence toward the code communities willing to trade lines-of-code and other things.

I really like this visualization. It captures the essence of the matter better than any other I have heard.


I can see this as being useful for small groups and local communities as a way to reinforce community bonds and build wealth. Technology can probably enhance the number of people you can realistically keep track of to a few hundred. However, I am much less confident this can scale up like you are envisioning. Once you grow beyond a size where you can keep track of the individuals involved you become reliant on a large centralized reputation system and that is inherently prone to abuse in several ways.

Potential Problems:

1) Individuals who game the system acting honestly with multiple small local trades then comitting fraud on rare large trades with distant individuals.
2) Use of a centralized ejection mechanism (being kicked from the group) as a tool for unfair wealth extraction/terror of low power individuals.
3) As the system grows it will become vunerable to the same difficulties our current system faces. (Outlined below in the Iron Law of Political Economics Quote).
4) Who pays for development upkeep and maintence of the system.

0