At the AGM we discussed combining my reputation system with the official Bitcoin currency. I wanted to give you an update on my thoughts on that topic: First of all, it's a good idea to focus our economics projects in that way, because we can put everything into an integrated system. When I tried to develop a reputation based economy I finally realized that it's a bad idea not to integrate some kind of money currency into the system. Money is very useful, after all. My first idea how to combine both concepts (reputation and money) was to make some kind of "pot" which is then paid out to all users of that system - in proportion to their Prestige index. But to make that system a reality you really need such a pot in the first place. So, I've come up with the idea of creating a new currency that is coupled with the reputation system directly, the Fluido. That would have eliminated the problem of getting a pot of external money. But many people prefer using already existing currencies, for obvious reasons. Yesterday I had the idea that users of a Prestige Bitcoin system could pay Bitcoin into a general fund. They wouldn't get a direct gratification for that, but if they decide to make their donation not anonymously, they might get some reputation from other users for their generosity. Every user with at least some Prestige would get regular payments out of that general fund. Let's say every week 5-10% of the fund are distributed to those users. Then there's also the problem that people need to mine blocks if this new hybrid system is supposed to work on a decentralized basis just like Bitcoin. My idea regarding that problem is to grant users who mine blocks a fixed number of Prestige points. This creates different ways for getting Prestige points, so it would not be very clear whether those points represent public approval or mining rewards. By displaying the mining rewards explicitly and contrasting them with the pure "public appreciation" Prestige people would still get a clear information what a certain Prestige score actually reveals. Still, both types of Prestige are equivalent in the sense that they are used by the system in exactly the same way. Apart from those considerations I think the project can be split up into different phases of development: Phase 1: Develop the core Prestige system with a centralized architecture, because that's the easiest thing which can be implemented in a reasonable time frame. In any case, already this relatively simple system would be quite useful for many small groups like ours as internal economic tool. Phase 2: Make a pure Prestige system that's decentralized, based on the ideas of the Bitcoin technology. This system would already have the potential to go global and become a widely used tool for representing reputation. Phase 3: Create the Prestige Bitcoin General Fund which couples the decentralized Prestige system with the official Bitcoin currency. It would be simply a kind of add-on to the Prestige system. In a similar fashion it would also be possible to design the Fluido as another add-on to the Prestige system. Users of the Prestige system would be able to decide which add-ons they use. Eventually, third parties could even create their own add-ons. What do you think about those ideas? -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE