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

[Tim May]

On Sunday, November 25, 2001, at 07:05 PM, Lucky Green wrote:

> Greg wrote:
>> That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these
>> tokens are handed
>> out for free, then what, exactly, is their value?
>>
>> I think the Extropians did something like that, which ended
>> in some sort of
>> fiasco which some cypherpunks were involved in, though I
>> don't know the
>> details and was never a participant in that list/social circle.
>
> I am unfamiliar with the Extropian electronic token experiment, but I as
> the first person on the planet to have conducted an Ecash-to-fiat
> currency transaction, I can assure you that somebody out there may well
> be willing to pay real cash for freely minted tokens. (I was on the
> Ecash selling side. The USD 35 for which I sold my Ecash beta tokens are
> still in my filing cabinet).

I believe Greg may have been referring to a "reputation market" 
experiment, circa 1993. Each list subscriber was given some number of 
tokens and then a market in reputations was "declared." People could buy 
and sell shares in the reputations of anyone, including themselves. The 
thought was that prices would go up on those reputations people thought 
the price would go up on. Issues of the "real" reputation were secondary 
issues (i.e., if people thought someone was a turkey, they probably 
wouldn't expect his rep to go up, despite the artificial nature of the 
market).

I think the guy who wrote the market software was living in Salt Lake 
City at the time, but I could be misremembering. I don't remember his 
name, and my archives from back then are in a jumble.

One thing that was interesting was the opportunity to manipulate the 
market. I offered to buy tokens from others, for cash. One person sold 
me all of his tokens for the agreed-upon price of $20. I sent him the 
money and he mailed his tokens to me. I then proceeded to use my extra 
"wealth" to bid up the value of my own reputation.

The tokens were not cryptographically-strong forms of digital cash, but 
they worked for the intended purpose. (That is, no one tried to forge 
them, at least not successfully.)


--Tim May
"The great object is that every man be armed and everyone who is able 
may have a gun." --Patrick Henry
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be 
properly armed." --Alexander Hamilton