On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Tim May wrote:

Any system involving units of Mojo, or understanding of auction models, etc. is hampered. And any system that has only a tiny fraction of what Napster had at its peak is hit with the "So what?" factor. And the Fax Effect kicks in--few users, not as many options, stagnation.

Mojo Nation doesn't have to "sell" directly to consumers. In fact, as you point out, it's not realistic to expect consumers to manage their own pricing. On the other hand, this might be an opportunity for people to build services on top of Mojo Nation. Such a "middle" service could provide a consumer with a turnkey, flat fee, no hassle service, while using Mojo Nation to obtain the most efficient prics possible for resources. The difference between the flat fee and the "most efficient" price provided by Mojo becomes the profit for the middle service. I don't even know if this works in theory, however. Presumably I could set up a model to investigate the relationship between "best possible" Mojo prices and the characteristics of the network - things like how many users, how much trading, liqudity, which pricing algorithms people use, and so on. Then we could ask questions like "how many people need to be offering which kinds of services before a service built on top of Mojo can be profitable?" The ideal situation would be one in which the middle service can undercut "traditional" providers -- and still make money. Except that doesn't look like it's going to happen in the real world. You've mentioned the fact that not enough people are running Mojo clients ("thin market"/"illiquid"). It's not clear what it would take to get more people in the Mojo marketplace; even if the theory works out beyond my wildest dreams and I could somehow "prove" that Mojo will make everyone money **if only ten million people sign up tomorrow**, I suspect no one would pay attention. There are other problems as well. For one thing, who are the "traditional providers" in the previous paragraph against whom a Mojo service would compete? in markets for which resources? In the case of disk space, it seems to be the people who make and sell hard drives; both entrenched and selling physical goods which any middle service would be hard pressed to emulate perfectly. Plus, as one of the anonymous posters noted, the disk market is quite non-volatile (maybe "boring" is the right word) with a pronounced trend downward; what is the incentive to use a Mojo-based service there if the customer can just wait a week and then buy a bigger HD? So are there markets for which a "middle service" could work? I apologize for going on at length about this, but if you want Mojo to correspond at all to real money instead of being a DoS protection feature, I don't see many other ways than "middle services" to make it work on a wide scale. Then again, I may just be lacking imagination. Does anyone happen to know of real-world current examples like this, in which some aggregator buys and sells a commodity on an exchange, then turns around and offers it at a flat rate to end users?

(Hint: Faustine, especially, should read "TAZ." And "True Names." And "Ender's Game." And the archives. And the Cyphernomicon. Get beyond the fog of the mundane and see where the degrees of freedom of the Web will take us.)

Have you seen the SemioText(e) anthology? "TAZ" is in it, along with stuff from J.G. Ballard, the Church of the Subgenius, stories vaguely inspired by gnosticism, and other usual suspects. Reading it reminded me of reading Douglas Rushkoff's _Cyberia_ for the first time -- another book which gives new meaning to your "see where the degrees of freedom of the Web will take us." Heady stuff, all of it, and now seems to be out of fashion, but that's a tangent... -David Molnar