At 11:45 PM 11/20/2001 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
distribution. Unfortunately the MN network lacks compelling content
Right - it's for optimizing load balancing and data distribution. Roughly stated, it seems to me to be a DoS prevention mechanism. It's not at all clear that Mojo will ever be meaningfully convertible to "real" money, at least not to me. but then again, I'm often unclear.
Very early in its lifetime, the Autonomous Zones/Mojo Nation people said that maybe Mojo would someday be exchangable with real cash, though the assumption was that during the early stages of software development, people were playing with worthless currency for proof-of-concept, and that at some point the old Mojo would be useless or disabled, and people would start using New Mojo instead, where New Mojo might have real value. Since then (that description is meant to be of the state of the Mojo Nation in October 2000 or so), they've abandoned plans for making Mojo valuable and/or convertible to other currencies, and it is only intended as a resource allocation tool and/or DoS prevention mechanism. As far as I know - I stopped paying close attention to them when they shifted focus from a currency-based publishing system to a load-balanced content delivery system - they also give out all the Mojo you care to ask for, free, 10 million Mojos at a time - so it seems very unlikely that the current tokens will ever be convertible to real value, given that sort of inflationary history. And that problem seems to be at the center of Nomen Nescio's sotto voce suggestion that some unnamed cypherpunks work up a currency which can be used to "pay" people for providing information which is of value - I get the impression that s/he is imagining some magic fairy would mint up piles of the currency, and assign it equally to every subscriber, who would then be empowered to pay it to the content providers they liked best. That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these tokens are handed out for free, then what, exactly, is their value? I think the Extropians did something like that, which ended in some sort of fiasco which some cypherpunks were involved in, though I don't know the details and was never a participant in that list/social circle. -- Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961 5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy. 1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace.