Making Money in Digital Money

zem zem at vigilant.tv
Wed Apr 30 23:18:25 PDT 2003


Dave Emery wrote:
> 	But Mallet can just strip her signature and substitute his
> and build up a reputation as a quality editor without doing any work.
> Nobody needs HER signature if his judgements/filtering are just as
> good....

Yes, but:

If Alice's editorial approval is valuable, Mallet won't be the only one
emulating her output - he'll be competing with many other emulators. 
Each of those emulators subscribes to (and pays for) Alice's service.

Alice controls supply - and hence her emulators' reputations.  She can
charge higher rates for better service - faster, or with more coverage.
 She can deliberately degrade the quality or timeliness of a selected
customer's service, if she figures out he's a Mallet - damaging her
reputation in the process, but perhaps hurting his more.  All the little
Mallets have to pay Alice's top rates if they want to match her
reputation.  They can't afford to get their stuff from another Mallet,
if they want to keep up, because then _he_ controls their supply.

The value of Mallet's reputation can approach that of Alice, but - as
long as there's a nanosecond's delay between her output and his - never
quite reach it.  Any of the tricks Mallet can use to increase his
reputation (emulating multiple Editors, for example) are also available
to Alice.  Highly competitive, yes - but the money flows upstream.

You can watch this happening right now, albeit without the crypto and
cash: weblogs.  Substitute 'link to content' for 'signature', and 'link
to weblog' for 'payment', and the process is the same.  Notice how
'payments' aren't evenly distributed?  There's a reason for that.  And
it's not guns.


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