Perry writes:
Information is useless as a currency, for five reasons.
1) It is not fungible. 2) In order to demonstrate that you have it you generally speaking have to have already given it away. 3) It can decay in value, unpredictably. My inside information that Joe Blow is a communist spy is valuable today and might become worthless tomorrow. 4) It cannot be effectively loaned or borrowed. 5) It has highly unpredictable value. Two pieces of information might be worth the same number of pieces of gold from me, but you may find one of them worthless and the other very worthwhile.
Hmm. It seems to me that a bunch of these characteristics you've described seem very similar to a stock market situation. I would use the analogy of information as shares... It also seems that number two is a typical zero knowledge situation - plus the fact that if I tell you I have a piece of code that does x - you want the code, and knowing what it does has no real value to you, if you just want it for its functionality. BTW, what is fungible? I've seen this term used several times, but have no idea what it means.
Dollars are a natural currency for use in internet trade. So are gold, D-Marks, Yen, etc. There is nothing wrong with these things.
I'll agree that I don't like government sponsored currencies, but since everything is denominated in them right now I'd say that they are perfectly fine.
I think this is a key point - there has to be a common sponsoring agency, a "data bank" or something that holds all the keys, and has all the info. Making a currency isn't really the hard part here - someone could just encrypt a textfile that says "This is a five point cyphermark". All that's important is the key authentication at the bank, who will be the party who trades it around ultimately - it's getting people to agree on it, and give it value that's the issue... Zen, philosopher-at-large