Pricing Mojo, Integrating PGP, TAZ, and D.C. Cypherpunks

[Greg Broiles]

At 04:38 AM 11/24/2001 +0100, Anonymous wrote:

>The main question is again whether there exists an initial market which
>could be enticed into trying out this package on an experimental basis.

What we're missing here is a party who's got a strong reputation and a deep 
balance sheet who's willing to offer to exchange, on a stable long-term 
basis, the hypothetical e-cash for something of value - dollars, gold, disk 
space, professional advice, whatever.

In a mature market, that role isn't necessarily played by one big 
participant, but by many small ones - e.g., the US government won't give me 
gold for my dollars, but lots of coin stores will, and besides, I've had 
pretty good luck exchanging my dollars for food, housing, computers, etc, 
in pretty stable fashion.

Until participants think that their time and investment made available to 
this system are reasonably likely to be available to them as outputs of one 
form or another, it'll be just another amusing hobby, like the existing P2P 
distribution systems (Gnutella, Napster, Morpheus/KaZaa, Mojo Nation, 
Freenet, etc).

I'd be willing to make resources I've got on hand available in exchange for 
less-well-known currencies, assuming I can have some confidence that the 
lesser-known currency will itself be exchangable for something that I want.

(I experimented with auctioning some items for grams of gold on 
<http://www.goldbarter.com> but didn't get any bids, and subsequently sold 
them for appreciably more in US dollars elsewhere, though some of that's 
probably due to GoldBarter's low profile versus Amazon and Ebay.)


--
Greg Broiles -- gbroiles at parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961
4000 dead in NYC? National tragedy.
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