

A World (Online) Without Money - modsearch
http://continuations.com/post/1433615472/a-world-online-without-money

======
Yzupnick
I'm not sure he realizes what money is. Listia credits are money. It is
actually the same system we use today. Dollars have no inherent use, but
people value them because you can trade them for physical items that do have
use. This is exactly what the Listia credits are. The only difference is that
there has been no exchange rate set up between that and other forms of money,
but I am willing to bet that this will come to.

Money is a mode of trade. When you sell somebody a computer, and use that
money to buy a hamburger (a really expensive gourmet one) you are in essence
trading that computer for a hamburger. (Ok, it is a little more complicated,
but not much.)

Money is a good thing. To quote a certain author (who I won't name because it
will cause more debate than it really deserves.) "Money is the material shape
of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade
and give value for value."

This so called "Age of abundance" is a dream that can not exist. And even if
it could, I am not sure I would want to live in it. To live in a world in
which everything is provided for me, with no work and no effort, is to live in
a world with no purpose. It sounds more like hell to me.

There were other issues, but I don't have time right now to deal with them.

~~~
kscaldef
> To live in a world in which everything is provided for me, with no work and
> no effort, is to live in a world with no purpose.

Feeding and housing and clothing myself are not my "purpose", and many things
which I find enjoyable would not be provided for me in an "age of abundance";
in fact, they are inherently things that no one else can provide for me.

~~~
jerf
I wish Yzupnick had left that part out, because the rest is true. Money falls
out of a few simple assumptions, which just spewing them out in a simple HN
comment (i.e. "please don't hammer me too much on the mathematical details")
is something like: 1. For any given thing, different people have varying
personal valuations of that thing. 2. As people have more of a thing, they
value gaining yet more of that thing less per unit. 3. People can engage in
the trade of goods.

From there it's a short step to bartering things for things I value highly
with things I have too much of (or can make too much of) and therefore value
less than my trading partner does, and from there only a slightly longer step
before an economy develops in which there is a measure of fundamental market
value, because the actors in the market conduct arbitrage until there are no
more arbitrage opportunities, which mathematically implies the existence of a
sort of standardized value measure.

I call money the most real abstract concept in the world. You can't actually
have any of this "value", you can only have dollars or Euros or 1000 pounds of
cabbage or something else real, but it underlies and informs every economic
thing you do. You _just barely_ can't touch it, it's just as real as it can be
without quite being real. And money will exist until at least one of those
three things is no longer true. (And even post-scarcity there will still be
the little matter of _time_ , and the trades thereof.)

(If this interested you, I really recommend at least the first few chapters of
[http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC.html)
.)

~~~
derefr
People value their time, but they don't value it like an economically-scarce
commodity. For example, you may consider your significant other to have an
"infinite line of credit" on your time, while you may actually _spend more
time_ actively avoiding people you don't want to spend time _with_ , than the
amount of time you'd end up spending with them (i.e. people can actually have
a negative return on time—whereas the worst you can do with N dollars is to
turn it into 0 dollars.) People are willing to give others as much of their
time as they ask for, if they see some sort of benefit coming from it (e.g.
monks living in a monastery their entire lives), while there is only a finite
amount of money they'd be willing to spend in the same situation.

This is all because people do not rationally value their time vis. their
finite lifespan, but unless you're expecting that to change somehow, you can
just take that as a given.

Thus, since time is psychologically considered abundant, then assuming a world
that is otherwise abundant, perhaps money would indeed be outmoded by
something that captures the _psychological_ value, rather than _economic_
value, of time spent? I think Cory Doctorow's "whuffie" is a good start on
that. Rather than whuffie changing as you give or take people's time (i.e.
time-debt), it's actually a measure of willingness-to-lend-time, sort of like
a credit score. If you borrow someone's bike and win a race with it, and they
think that's cool, your time-credit-score goes up; if you wreck it or just
disappear, and they don't like that, your time-credit-score goes down. The
important bit here is that the credit score isn't actually tracking any sort
of real debt, because, for the most part, _people_ don't track time debt; they
just write it off and re-evaluate how much time they'll be willing to lend you
in the future.

~~~
jerf
"perhaps money would indeed be outmoded by something that captures the
psychological value, rather than economic value, of time spent?"

That "something" would be a form of money. That was my point. If dollars were
still around, there would be an exchange rate between dollars and whuffies,
and as long as they could indeed be freely exchanged the eventual elimination
of arbitrage opportunities (by virtue of exploiting them) would make them
merely two more currencies. If dollars were not around but there were whuffies
and huffies, both time-debt-backed currencies, there would be an exchange rate
and the exploitation of arbitrage opportunities would make them look just like
two currencies do today.

It does not take much for money to show up, and you would find that if such a
new currency does arise and you insist that it's something new and "not
moneyish" and you try to follow that up by your actions that you will be taken
to the cleaners by people who know better. (In fact it's quite amusing to
watch the desperate attempts by MMORPGs to avoid getting their currencies
straight-up tied to dollars, and the only way to do that is to make every
effort to ensure that there is no liquidity between the two currencies such
that the balancing effects of the market can take effect, because otherwise
they would end up freely convertible virtually overnight. I think the only
reason they try to avoid this outcome so hard is the legal nightmare it would
generate; the IRS is happy to tax anything that looks remotely like currency,
by which I mean, this is not speculation, this is actual fact. You today can
not dodge the IRS by making up your own currency.)

------
zazi
"Why would you want to do away with money? As it turns out money is too
powerful an incentive. When you throw money into the equation, it tends to
drown out other motivations such altruism, social norms and reputation. Dan
Ariely has a wonderful example of this in his book “Predictably Irrational”
where he describes how a nursery school tried to use cash penalties to prevent
parents from dropping off their kids late. With the cash penalty the number of
late drop offs went up (!) because now parents felt like they were paying for
a service. The money completely overwhelmed feeling bad for imposing upon the
teachers. Amazingly, money was so powerful that even when the school dropped
the cash penalties the late drop offs stayed above their initial level."

Is it just me or does anyone find something wrong with analysis of the
underlying motivations for this para?

My read is: The introduction of money changed the dynamics of dropping their
kids off late from a moral obligation to a business transaction. It being a
business transaction, the penalty now becomes the loss of some money as
compared to a hit to your moral standing. For busy parents, they may prefer
the monetary loss as compared to feeling like a bad parent. Hence the number
of people dropping their kids off late increased. If this could be true, then
money may NOT be the that powerful an incentive. In this case, moral
reputation/standing is a more powerful incentive. The school should be
appealing to that rather than using money as a penalty.

------
sayemm
I think the focus of his post, which is that there are very powerful social
forces at play that guide human behavior outside of a monetary transaction, is
spot-on -- but it always has been like that.

What I greatly disagree w/ though is whether this is anything new at all or
that the world is fundamentally heading towards an "age of abundance".

Why StackOverflow is kicking ass is the same reason we love HN. It's the
community. That's it. No flimsy game mechanics. No monetary rewards or points
involved (though like any large social group, there are demarcations for roles
and status, like the HN karma). It's the gravitational pull of a strong
community with shared interests. This is all textbook Seth Godin, nothing new
here.

Strong communities have been budding since the dawn of civilization... so it's
weird to say that the online world is pioneering this in any way for the
offline world. What it is doing though is accelerating the community because
of the sheer global scale of the web, which is unprecedented.

Money will always be driving the world, but more community-building tipping
points to come.

------
kiba
Money is not disappearing, but it is simply evolving.

We're now seeing an economy based on the idea of money secured by cryptography
evolving in a tiny corner of the internet. Most hackers here are not aware
that such an economy exists.

~~~
jambo
Please enlighten us. Are they on TOR hidden services? Links?

[edited to sound less snarky. genuinely curious]

~~~
kiba
We called it bitcoins and it is a _Neal Stephenson_ plot device.

~~~
mootothemax
What's the take-up like compared to the only other tor-based system I'm aware
of, eCache?

(web interface: <https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/>)

~~~
kiba
It's not a tor-based system at all, though it can be used within the tor
network.

It does have an active forum community, exchange markets, and the like.

------
rfugger
My project for a new form of money:

<http://ripple-project.org/>

Everyone issues their own personal currency, but you only accept the currency
of people you trust to make good on their obligations to you personally. For
those you don't trust, the system finds intermediaries to exchange the buyer's
obligations for those acceptable to the seller.

Lots of work needs to be done to make this useful, but I've had a system
operating for several years now at <http://ripplepay.com>. Comments always
welcome.

------
revorad
_Online (at least on the margin), the cost of resources is already
sufficiently close to zero so as to not matter._

If that's the case, why does StackOverflow need venture funding? VCs investing
money in such sites are surely looking for returns in money. So, what's the OP
really trying to say?

I must be missing something. Can someone please explain?

~~~
robryan
I think it's more about the marginal cost of one extra question on
StackOverflow rather than the entire site. Unlike a physical good where there
is an additional fixed cost of every unit the fixed cost of one more
StackOverflow question or user is close to zero.

------
AndrewMoffat
Call me paranoid, but I'm wary of Listia. Who regulates the issuance of
credits which are used to purchase actual goods? (answer: Listia) What legal
repercussions are stopping them from issuing credits to whoever they want?
(answer: none)

~~~
noonespecial
And that's very different from paypal freezing accounts and keeping money
arbitrarily how?

Paypal has the incentive to keep your money of, well, your money. Listia the
company has considerably less incentive to mess with the credits. They are the
government issuing the currency. Mess with it too much and they wreck their
economy.

~~~
AndrewMoffat
It's different because Paypal can't issue money, but Listia can.

