Making Money in Digital Money

[James A. Donald]

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On 28 Apr 2003 at 22:30, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today.
> You can't build a digital money system on paying for
> information goods, in a world where people expect to get
> their information goods for free.
>
> I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like
> James Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market.
> Wake up, gramps! My God, nothing could make you sound more
> like a clueless refugee from the 90s than a statement like
> that.  It's a perfect illustration of how irrelevant the
> cypherpunks have become.
>
> At one time, cypherpunks, with their libertarian and
> anarchocapitalist views, assumed that the online world was
> turning into Galt's Gulch, a world where people would
> constantly pay for exchanges of information. What they didn't
> foresee is that it turned instead into a communist utopia,
> where each supplies according to his abilities, and each
> takes according to his needs.  And it works online, unlike in
> the physical world, because no matter how much each person
> takes, there's still plenty for everyone else.  Information
> doesn't get used up.

If this was true then the proportion of wealth spent on
informational goods, and income earned from informational
goods, would be smaller and smaller.   Instead it is larger and
larger.

Some kinds of Information continually get used up, as in being
no longer relevant to the individual or the situation.  This is
the kind of information people still pay serious money for.

Most of us on the cypherpunks list earn our living producing or
transforming information.  We expected that by now we would be
telecommuting from some tropical isle and being paid in
anonymous untraceable money.  We were wrong, but it certainly
is not because the provision of information has come to accord
with some communist utopia.

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         James A. Donald
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