Ryan Lackey writes:

When I was working on Eternity DDS stuff, I basically came to the same conclusion as Adam -- without anonymous bearer cash, you can't do a workable eternity implementation.

Well there is always hashcash (http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/) -- a highly distributed protocol, which should be easy to deploy, not requiring central servers, and also (importantly) not requiring any cooperation from banks or other parties. One could use a simulated profit maximisation function based on hashcash to allocate donated eternity space. However, one suspects that due to the lack of convertibility, and transferability of a unit of hashcash, people would start to use other value metrics. Perhaps political (servers cheating to help their pet political cause, as there is no actual real profit motivation to optimising for hashcash profit), or perhaps real cash leaking in, or secondary market in hashcash. The latter two would be a nice outcome :-) Perhaps this may be an application for Wei Dei's b-money protocol (more on b-money in another post).

It's an open question whether you could issue bearer cash backed in Eternity-units.

Nice that. Did you notice someone (I think on one of Bob Hettinga's lists) proposing the sale of a percentage of internet bandwidth as a net resource based unit. As a proposed way to perhaps get around hyper inflation, I think, though I am not sure entirely how this could work either. If I buy a particular unit of bandwidth I know it's value will fall fast. But the value of a _percentage_ of internet bandwidth will increase. However the people funding the bandwidth -- why would they want to consider me a 0.001% stakeholder in their bandwidth? One would need to buy shares in major bandwidth provision companies like say cable & wireless. Buy some shares in that to obtain a percentage of the ownership of the percentage of total net bandwidth that C&W owns? Doesn't help. Would a company selling bandwidth by the 1000th of a percentage of global bandwidth profit from this? It would have to use the money raised by selling bandwidth percentage at todays prices to fund increases in bandwidth in line with total bandwidth growth just to fulfill it's obligations. Add bearer share certificates for the 1000th percentage of global bandwidth and you have an appreciating bearer asset based on net resources. As long as such companies made enough money to continue to exist. Anyone have any plausible sounding business plans for such an endeavour?

That was my original plan, but it seems you would still want to have gold-units to trade for Eternity units. The problems of guaranteeing quality of service in exchange for Eternity units are complicated but tractable, but having a separate scheme for auditing performance.

Where I think "political" schemes would be particularly beneficial is in sharing administrative control over a virtual corporation, etc.

Political schemes such as those proposed by Markus are pretty nice for collaborative filtering. Just I would rather schemes be strongly voluntary, and not have any negative effect on the purchasability of eternity space by others. Adam