Comments on: Why the World Needs New Currencies

By: djstrouse

djstrouse — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:01:59 +0000

I only recently recognized this upside to PageRank, and its good that you pointed it out, Joel. One weakness though is that it does not distinguish between the kind of popular information that we want to promote with economic rewards, and the kind that we may not. For instance, Wikipedia and a porn site might both have very high PageRank values. Both might be very popular and often linked to. However, its obvious that only one of them deserves some kind of "extra economic incentive", since one service we value as a society and the other we value as individuals. I think humans know how to recognize the difference and we, roughly speaking, we call the former a necessity and the latter a luxury. Anyways, if you are interested in the topic, you should consider reading Chris Anderson's recently published Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which explores new ways to place value on these new economic paradigms. It is free in both audiobook and E-book versions.

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:27:06 +0000

Very thought provoking. I think that a mechanism which finds how much economic value is provided by a certain freely provided “information” product, is the first step in compensating the creator of such a product. One such (not perfect) measuring system is Google PageRank, which tries to rank web pages according to the value of the information they host. But this is only a rank from 0 to 10 and not the actual economic value. 2 pages with the same page rank may have very different economic value. But maybe it’s a start ?

By: More disruption, courtesy the internet - Daniel Bachhuber

More disruption, courtesy the internet - Daniel Bachhuber — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:47:58 +0000

[...] heartening to know that there are other crazies out there working their minds through the same observations of a fundamental change taking place. There’s tremendous room for intellectual growth, [...]

By: djstrouse

djstrouse — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:28:23 +0000

Yes, the idea (like any that disrupts a very old and entrenched system) is likely to receive great resistance from those who have gotten used to it.

The biggest obstacle I can’t seem to think my way around is that any new currency can simply be traded be other types of currency on the black market. That is, if we reward Gino the porn king with traditional money but reward Melvin the social entrepreneur with some kind of political capital, Gino could simply “buy” political capital with his money.

So one of the greatest perceived advantages of our current monetary system, flexibility, is also one of the biggest hurdles to a better system.

By: Joey Baker

Joey Baker — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:11:05 +0000

huh. You’ve got me thinking:

I like where you start to go with governments being setup to pay for communal projects that individuals will not pay for and then linking to wikipedia.

I’m approaching this from the perspective of a journalist, and the problem presented here is certainly applicable.

Especially when you consider the relation to copyright, which is basically just a short way of saying IP needs to be accounted for in a currency besides money.

I don’t know how this is going to be accounted for, but money hasn’t worked so far.

The issue of course, is proposing to overthrow the entire basis for the world economy is not likely going to make many people take the proposal seriously.

Enough of my rambling, thanks to Daniel for bringing this post to my attention!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 04:17:01 +0000

Next step is to matrix what the different currencies would look like, and why they need to be distinct.