On 20 Nov 2001, at 22:54, Greg Broiles wrote:
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.
Here's my recollection as to how this was supposed to work: 1) people who participated in the beta got free mojo as a reward for participating (they'd keep their mojo when the beta period was over) 2) In the non-beta, people would have to pay (or something) to get a starting stash of mojo 3) I don't think the "Evil Geniuses" ever expected to act as mojo-cash brokers; rather, anyone who had a supply of cash and mojo could act as a cash-mojo broker, and mojo would find its own price.
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?
Right. If the tokens are EVER going to be worth anything, there can't be a way to accumulate then for free. If people have this psychological block against paying "real money" for tokens, maybe it's a good idea to make them trade CPU time for them in one of the seti-like projects. Somebody mentioned something about one involving protein-folding that sounded like it might actually be useful. George
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.