Dave Emery wrote:

But Mallet can just strip her signature and substitute his and build up a reputation as a quality editor without doing any work. Nobody needs HER signature if his judgements/filtering are just as good....

Yes, but: If Alice's editorial approval is valuable, Mallet won't be the only one emulating her output - he'll be competing with many other emulators. Each of those emulators subscribes to (and pays for) Alice's service. Alice controls supply - and hence her emulators' reputations. She can charge higher rates for better service - faster, or with more coverage. She can deliberately degrade the quality or timeliness of a selected customer's service, if she figures out he's a Mallet - damaging her reputation in the process, but perhaps hurting his more. All the little Mallets have to pay Alice's top rates if they want to match her reputation. They can't afford to get their stuff from another Mallet, if they want to keep up, because then _he_ controls their supply. The value of Mallet's reputation can approach that of Alice, but - as long as there's a nanosecond's delay between her output and his - never quite reach it. Any of the tricks Mallet can use to increase his reputation (emulating multiple Editors, for example) are also available to Alice. Highly competitive, yes - but the money flows upstream. You can watch this happening right now, albeit without the crypto and cash: weblogs. Substitute 'link to content' for 'signature', and 'link to weblog' for 'payment', and the process is the same. Notice how 'payments' aren't evenly distributed? There's a reason for that. And it's not guns. -- mailto:zem@vigilant.tv F289 2BDB 1DA0 F4C4 DC87 EC36 B2E3 4E75 C853 FD93 http://vigilant.tv/ "..I'm invisible, I'm invisible, I'm invisible.."