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I’m out in California right now, after having been invited to present at the privacy identity innovation conference, focused on ‘Building Trust in a Digital Age.’ The organizer had seen the writeup I did on Forbes – The Bank of Facebook: Currency, Identity and Reputation – and thought the angle might be a provocative one for the identity community to chew on.
Since the Future of Facebook Project team and I have just been wrapping up our first video in the 6 part series (FOFB: Economy), I figured I’d fly out and screen the rough cut for them and gauge the reaction.
And what an interesting reaction I got.
The title they gave my presentation was “Reputation as Currency,” which seemed to be an unwelcome concept.
After the screening, I said that I hoped the video might spark people’s thinking about the expanding definition of currency, and how reputation and online identity were evolving to become currencies in and of themselves, and in turn how personal data was becoming a new asset class.
The idea was that if the everyday non-techie person could imagine their online information as a currency or “money,” they would begin to wake up to the fact that this is very valuable information that they should demand as their right to own. It’s a step.
As soon as I finished talking, well-known technology commentator and entrepreneur Esther Dyson took the mic and challenged the idea that reputation could be a currency, which led to a few others also debating the definition of what “currency” means.
I fell down the rabbit hole of exploring this topic when I put together the Future of Money video for the SIBOS financial services conference last fall. That video was focused on the ways people were beginning to exchange value in non-monetary ways or augmented ways based on social media platforms and virtual currencies. The bankers weren’t thrilled about that message either.
I’ve been following developments in currency since then, and have been generally inspired by the multitude of services that are blossoming that encourage people to share resources, barter, swap, collaborate, or generate value in sometimes unexpected new ways.
These social and economic behaviors are being facilitated by a number of virtual currencies, backed by everything from the social capital of a community to a basket of carbon futures.
So, can reputation be a currency?
The idea was popularized by Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and built upon further by Tara Hunt with the book The Whuffie Factor. But let’s break it down.
First, what’s a currency?
from Merriam-Webster:
1a. a circulation as a medium of exchange
1b. general use, acceptance, or prevalence <a story gaining currency>
2a. something (as coins, treasury notes, and banknotes) that is in circulation as a medium of exchange
2c. a common article for bartering
2d. a medium of verbal or intellectual expression
So, if a currency is a concept of a thing that acts as a medium of exchange, we’re already given leeway to imagine any number of things to be assigned to that medium.
For instance, superfluid uses Pints as a currency to enable people to collaborate on projects, Empire Avenue is a stock market simulation social network game that lets you buy and sell shares of people using Eaves as a currency, and Dibspace uses Dibits to enable growing businesses to exchange services. In Africa we’ve seen the rapid growth of M-PESA, which uses cell phone minutes as a currency.
Does currency have to be fungible?
Currency is associated with fungibility (though not critically dependent), as Esther pointed out, and reputation is not fungible.
As it is now, 10 of my reputation points in one platform may not be interchangeable for 10 of your reputation points in another platform, because reputation may be weighted differently or the community of people who use one reputation over another have different perceptions of their value.
But, we are only at the front end of this evolution, and it is not impossible to imagine how reputation currencies could take the High-Speed Train to Fungibility Town (now departing from Acceleration Station). This is the idea Art Brock proposed with The Metacurrency Project, which is “building tools and technologies to open source the next economy.”
One could also consider the metaphor of carbon credits. Before we could count them, carbon credits were not liquid and certainly not fungible – then gradually they became so. Now you can trade units of pollution. Reputation, along with many previously uncountable (and thus untradeable) units, is on a similar path.
Count → trade → trade more fluidly
So, Esther is right to point out that reputation currency is early and clunky and not altogether fungible, but wrong in the belief that reputation isn’t becoming a currency that will grow increasingly fungible.
A Cambrian Explosion of Currencies
Currencies are not just money, but mechanisms and systems that change the flows of attention, trust, participation and value in an information economy – like frequent flier miles, eBay ratings, votes, coupons, gift certificates, and social scoring metrics.
As we continue to move down the path of quantifying and mapping everything, any number of metrics can and will evolve to become currencies used to make economic, social, or political decisions.
A topical article was just published in TechCrunch today – Bitcoin, Ven and the End of Currency – written by Stan Stalnaker of Hub Culture. A great overview and more eloquently put than I could have managed in 2 minutes at the podium yesterday. An excerpt:
We need to urgently think about how the blurring of lines between currencies and everything else will affect us, our relationships, and our physical economies. How we create and measure value is going through a change that has not been seen in over 600 years—since the emergence of the first systematic nationalized currencies. It is profoundly affecting the central vs. distributed control of value, and the archetypes that surround how we measure value. It is a snowball today, but tomorrow it is an avalanche. Just watch.
I don’t believe that the world will end up with a single global currency or a single reserve currency, but in the very near term a network of reserve currencies will allow humans to pick and choose new options for trade. In fact, they are already here, and those mentioned are just the first. In the long term, these currencies, along with everything else of value, will be measured and represented on a unified system—most probably the Internet itself. The result of this will be the end of currency and the emergence of Singular Value.
The rise of Singular Value implies more efficient capital markets and the potential for ongoing GDP expansion. It implies a hybrid of fixed asset values and the more efficient monetization of knowledge, which is continually expanding. This combination could lead to an expanding supply of value relative to hard assets, which are almost certainly subject to peak resource pressure in the coming period anyway. The tension between these two assets and their relative value will set the agenda for much going forward.
What will be the consequences of losing control of our money supply to the Internet, and is there anything that can be done to avoid this outcome? The answer, as far as I can see, is a systemic rigidity of crushing proportion. Governments will not choose the value of their money, or be able to ease or tighten supply at will. One thing is clear: those who start learning to speak this new common language now will end up ahead of those who don’t. As for the concept of nations, built on tax and central monetary authority? Could the Internet itself someday control “our nation”? Will it be benignly totalitarian? It is food for thought.
Indeed it is.
—-
further reading:
Social Currencies and Mutual Guarantees via @webisteme
emergent by design 
Interesting.
Reputation has value, but can it be exchanged for other value?
Thanks, now you have given me a brain–earwig
And does the same level of personal information about two people lead to similar values in reputation?
And, flipping the argument, if I seek to generate more reputation value, is there an ultimate limit to how much I can create?
And where can I get brainwig inoculations? 🙂
I believe that reputation is an asset. It can be an appreciating or depreciating asset.
My mission is to implement industry standards that captures, measures, and utilizes Relationship Capital (RC).
We believe that kept-commitments and perceptions of you from others can be scored and deposited into your relationship capital account.
We now have an on-line social interaction process that can validate your reputation through RC.
thanks rob,
that’s been the basic response i’ve heard so far. asset, not currency.
As Colin noted below, “Reputation is something that can be taken away by others…My reputation is effectively owned by everyone except me.” So it has value but it’s not a form of private property, because your property is something that can’t be legally taken away from you in the normal course of business without your consent.
And, although you can have a reputation interaction, one party’s reputation doesn’t have to go down by the same amount that the counterparty’s reputation increases. So maybe words like “exchange” and “trade” aren’t right for reputation. “Interaction” and “transaction” are more general.
However, like currency, you can give other people reputation as compensation for something else. For example, in academia, if you need to ask for someone’s help with some part of your project, you can compensate them by promising to make them a co-author on the paper. In essence, you are increasing their reputation in exchange for them doing a service for you. Interestingly, in this situation it might actually be an exchange, because when you add their name to your paper, you are in fact decreasing your own glory. Another example: a person might be willing to accept a low-paying job with a prestigious firm, partly because they want to learn from them, but also because they value the reputation they will gain.
So, reputation has both similarities and differences with both assets and mediums of exchange. Here’s some more of my thoughts on the question: http://pietrust.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/reputation-compared-to-currency-economic-properties/
Identity = Asset
The data comprising identity = Currency
Perhaps, as anyone familiar with the Grameen approach to microfinance will know, this is based on moral collateral. A borrower must be trusted by the peers in her loan circle and the lender must have trust in all. We know this works.
I was asking a couple of years ago, in the context of social currency whether trust had a transitive property.
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=141306
Then I remembered something from way back. It conveys how we affirm the good in man through trust and in so doing we encourage good.
Sometimes, I worry that the notion of “trade” or “exchange” is a little misleading when it comes to reputation currencies. Both imply a tit-for-tat agreement that is made to prior to the economic interaction. In contrast, consider gifts. We really don’t call them “gifts” if there is a precise condition put on them prior to gifting. The limitation of gift economies has long been that they require a certain intimacy among the players to work. I think the real opportunity of reputation currencies is to help scale gift economies past bonds of kinship.
“I think the real opportunity of reputation currencies is to help scale gift economies past bonds of kinship.”
That seems like a natural path of least resistance. Any examples?
I am a big fan of http://www.couchsurfing.org/ but there are many similar examples where the challenge of gifting in an anonymous environment is met with reputation systems.
This video is an attempt to explain the relationship between relational dynamics and the mechanics of money in the era of social networks where trust and reputation play a critical role: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fybh4-iavYo
Thanks to all for this inspiring conversation!
thanks alan. that makes sense.
i think the title of the talk should have been “Reputation as Social Currency”, not just currency.
it hadn’t really even occurred to me when they asked me if it was ok.
and also with reputation, it’s also abundance based, right? like in your couchsurfing example, if i have a good reputation and it encourages someone to stay in my house, and the experience is good for both of us, i earn more reputation as a host and they earn more reputation as a traveler. we didn’t necessarily “trade” reputation, but we had an interaction that helped us both earn more.
thanks for the clarification.
Venessa, as you point out, it appears the steadily better quantification of reputation is destined to lead to increasing fluidity and fungibility. That seems like a no-brainer to me. E.
As far as Stalnaker’s vision, it’s reminiscent of John Smart’s valuecosm – http://www.accelerating.org/articles/hpe2032army.html#valuecosm – a natural outgrowth of the Total Systems Quantification drive that I like to wax on about – and the notion of a superfluid economy that we’ve been discussing here on this blog – so I am partial to it. Certainly I concur that we’re on the brink of major currency/value upheaval. That said, imo, he is a bit too caught up in the Singular Value scenario. Different contexts will lead to differences in value – so Singular Value would require Singular Context, to which there are many barriers, not least of which are competing human social systems that simply don’t choose to merge for whatever reason (defensive strategy, value strategy). More likely there will be several parallel economies / currencies (nature likes to try multiple variations of the same thing – systems redundancy principle). I don’t think a singular petrification is likely in the short-term and that we’ve probably got a few developmental stages to grow through before we encounter that.
Hi Venessa,
Interesting post. I am not surprised that these ideas were met with resistance, and expanded definition of currency definitely isn’t ‘current.’ I would agree that fungibility is not necessarily a feature of a currency, and that currencies are simply any commonly held symbols which mediate the flow of value.
However, I’m not sure if it doesn’t go too far to say that reputation itself is a currency. You mention that carbon credits are currencies, which makes sense. But carbon itself, or the right to emit carbon, is not a currency, but rather an asset which the currency represents. Likewise, reputation itself is an asset, but not a symbol. A reputation currency is a symbolic representation of that asset… it’s the symbol which I would personally view as the currency, rather than the thing the symbol represents.
That being said (I hope you don’t mind my pedantry) I certainly agree that the most practical way to think of such symbols of social capital is as currencies. The fungibility problems may or may not be addressed, but I don’t think that’s critical.
I still think it’s Socialism.
thanks webisteme,
as others have said too, reputation can be thought of as asset more than currency, and as alan put it above, it works as a social currency in a gift economy. the language is all so tricky.
perhaps calling it a social currency is good insofar as it may bring a nontech person to equate it with “value”, and from there the argument can be made that metrics and evolving graphs of personal data are assets that should be owned by individuals?
Hi Venessa,
I agree that ‘social currency’ is intuitive: it’s the class of currencies which try to represent social capital. I agree with Alan, but would go further – social currencies also mediate financial exchanges, for example on eBay, peer to peer rental sites, and so on.
It is a store of value, in itself and relative to what it enables me to do. I agree speaking of ‘ownership’ is useful here… we own a portfolio of social capital, and by extension social currencies.
Eli
great post. thank you for this thinking. just when my appetite was craving it.
i’m leaning toward reputation indeed becoming a currency. richness coming through the transparency the web elicits. the more transparent, the more trust.
so maybe the trust is the common article for bartering.. only it’s not bartering.
i see it blurring to a point of us no longer asking.. how can i sell more, what can i get for this. to the point that there is no need to talk fungibility. there is no thought of making things equal, because through the transparency we realize none of us are equal, but rather all unique.
Ellen Langer writes in Mindfulness, prejudice decreases and discrimination increases. the more we know a person, the more we trust them. the more we trust them, the more we realize our connectedness as opposed to our current bent toward prejudice. we see it’s really a matter of sharing amongst the same body, (rather than trading across diff bodies), – all the exchanges stay within the big us.
i’m thinking many don’t see such a potential, so we’re perpetuating a life no longer necessary. i life of doing things we don’t particularly care to do. but we’re mindlessly bound to it, because the value of money just isn’t questioned enough.
thanks monika.
i see what you’re saying about ‘no need to talk fungibility’ when talking about reputation as (social) currency because it’s not something you’re directly trading for something, but something that lubricates transactions or interactions…. so it’s more operating at a different layer. not necessarily in an exchange marketplace, but something more generative/collaborative/cooperative/gift-based.
ooh. i like this: something that lubricates transactions or interactions
In society, manners are also something that lubricates transactrions or interactions. Manners, though superficial at times, do reduce friction.
Hi Venessa – great discussion, the new world is coming fast 🙂
I wonder whether reputation can work as a currency. Or, more pointedly, society measuring a person’s worth by their bank balance seems problematic to me, and a key issue with our current setup.
For me, reputation is one thing, and fungible currency is another. Reputation is something that can be taken away by others, but not something one can give away or exchanged for something else. It is infinitely ‘usable’, and its value is largely subjective. My reputation is effectively owned by everyone except me. It may be contextually measurable in the new social web, but it is not mine.
For example, if I have a reputation of 1000 and give it all to charity, am I now without reputation – a societal outcast? My value as a person cannot be realistically measured by the contents of my wallet. Reputation would appear to be non-fungible.
Colin
thanks colin, good points.
I’m gonna have to admit I didn’t have a sound understanding of what fungible meant when I wrote that 🙂 Wouldn’t change the comment, but I had thought fungible meant something like ‘able to be used as a standard unit of exchange between different commodities’, and while it seems to fail that test too, its not what fungible means…
So – having corrected that little problem, I now know we’re talking about individual units of reputation being equivalent and interchangeable with each other (e.g. any $20 note is as good as any other). The new reasoning for non-fungibility is that reputation is contextual – a reputation point earned on ebay says something different than one earned on a dating site. Merging or exchanging them loses that context – probably not good to place trust in an ebay seller because of the size of their… dating prowess 🙂 Appears in lot’s of places – 100 points on Stack Overflow and 100 points on Amazon just don’t map to each other.
As an aside, Stack Overflow is interesting because you can ‘spend’ reputation by creating bounties on questions you want answered better/quicker – placing a bounty of 50 reduces your reputation by 50, and the user who answers correctly gets that 50 added to their reputation. It is all within the same contextual boundary though.
But within a given context it is usually fungible whenever it is quantified — e.g. one set of 10 points on Stack Overflow is as good as another set of 10 points on Stack Overflow.
Colin, likewise I’d not understood fungible, though above I refer to the transitive property of trust, that for example because many people trust Colin and Colin trusts Jeff, it does not follow that Jeff is trusted by many. Trust is also required of fiat currency where it is based on the reputation of a bank. If it were possible to transfer reputation, rather than you ending with none, it would more likely be the case that both parties would benefit in reputation and attract further trust. The point made by Lao Tse is that we cannot be trusted if we ourselves don’t extend trust.
In the Harvard article Frank refers to here, there are a couple of interesting examples, which we all should be able to relate to. One is ‘steal’ the reputation of another to gain trust, another is the use of anonymity to ‘take down’ the reputation of others online, without risk to self.
These are both very familiar experiences in the context of human rights activism I’m engaged in online.
So one might think that this is similar to different countries having different currencies, but it should then be easy to set up exchange rates between say stack overflow and a dating site. However trying to follow that thread quickly breaks down e.g. the dating site might value your stack rating – everyone loves geeks – but stack overflow is unlikely to place much value on the dating reputation, so the reverse exchange fails. With countries, if I trade UKP for USD, and then immediately back again, the only real loss is the fees.
thanks for choosing this direction ..
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22empirical+reputation+metrics%22&num=30
6 results from 2001 and 2001, first from at ledgerism that i mentioned before – from/via/about Todd = http://rosehill.net/
this is more than a leg up, specially for teccies .. i imagine .. not being one such
At PieTrust (an “open company”; join us!), we’re working on a “reputation economy” system that would allow a sort of fungible reputation, calculated from others’ evaluations, to be used as a medium of exchange. I call it a medium of exchange, not a currency, because it’s not a form of property and it’s not a good store of value (your reputation can drop at any time if others alter their evaluations; as Colin said, your reputation is “effectively owned by everyone but you”).
As Alan said, we hope to “scale gift economies past bonds of kinship”.
Interesting post, Venessa! Like you, I’m leaning more toward the “asset” rather than “currency” interpretation.
One point, though, is that many of the metacurrencies now in use can actually be given financial values, even if a direct exchange isn’t possible. I’ve been watching my AmEx points and Priority Club points and so on, and the value keeps translating into about 1% of dollars spent, regardless of the context.
Likewise, my wife and I belong to BookMooch.com, which has a point system scaled to the trade of a single paperback book. Given US media mail rates, this means each point translates to about $2.20. International mooches are 3 points and usually ends up somewhere in the $6-$7 range for the most common mooches. It’s been surprisingly consistent.
In science, common measurements in a field tend to be given common names (tesla, mil, angstrom, etc.) as a shorthand, even if they are based on other systems of measurement. I wonder if this is a better analogy for metacurrencies – stand-ins for financial value, but more useful due to context.
Barry,
I would suggest that the type of currencies you mention (Air miles, Bookmooch credit) are in fact not social currencies, but types of fungible money. Social currencies represent social assets, such as reputation or trustworthiness. The types of currencies you mention are more like money in that they do not represent a social asset, and don’t lose their meaning when transferred to another person. Consequently, they can also be bought for money (in principle, though rules might forbid this.)
So, in general, I wouldn’t go as far as saying social currencies are stand-ins for financial value. But, you could say that they are substitutes for financial capital, if a social currency I can leverage enables me to get access to something I need with less or no money.
Eli
No more rabbit holes to go down nto, Venessa. This resistance is part of what comes up as a sign of achievement when you “poke the box” (recent book by Seth Godin) or “do the work” (recent book by Steven Pressfield). Resistance is an awesome compass for finding what needs to be done in spite, and your story is the first one to illuminate how to recognize collective resistance. There are books waiting to be written.
Now, let us test whether personal data and reputation can be currencies. I step on the shoulders of a giant, Bernard A. Lietaer.
Just one example how people use personal data almost in a quid-quo-pro way: not-yet-lovers on a first date. Cautiously they watch fir value or the lack of, motivated to build the trust and intimacy needed to ensure the survival of mankind as a species. There is almost a social code of caution of how much personal information each reveals along the many steps to establish the spectrum of trust. Personal currency, fungible among the couple, almost no one else.
Friendship, and reputation, on the other hand, can be widely fungible, for example by endorsement, especially if there is no actual or apparent conflict of interest. So, yes, to me reputation can be a currency, but no one is obliged to take my word for someone else.
Reputation is a currency of permanent due diligence.
Hmm… A disappointing post ended by a TL;DR quote from another disappointing (ok, actually nonsensical) post. Maybe my expectations are too high when I see Venessa’s byline?
hi gene,
sorry you were disappointed. which part was nonsensical for you? perhaps if you read the ‘TL;DR’ quote or that entire article, the information about virtual currencies would become more clear.
the quote was partly in reference to Ven, a digital currency used by Hub Culture that’s backed by a basket of carbon futures. you can learn more about it here:
http://www.hubculture.com/groups/237/news/556/
I didn’t find this post disappointing, on the contrary. On the other hand, the Ven article is somewhat misguided in its proposal that we are heading towards a ‘value singularity’ in which everything and nothing is going to be a currency. Its basic premise, that quantification implies fungibility, is wrong. Just because Facebook can count likes on my blog post doesn’t mean I can pay the rent with them, etc.
I joined Hub Culture recently to learn about the Ven and read the whole TC post a few days ago. That post has a weird holographic property: not only it is TL;DR as a whole, each of its parts is, too 🙂
Top ten nonsensical things in the Ven post:
1. As Eli points out, quantification does not imply fungibility
2. About Bitcoin: “Man does not control this currency, the Algorithm does.”
3. “Open markets, open currency, open chaos, and a cambrian explosion of value sets”.
4. “It was a watershed moment for us, and a confusing one, because the Ven had no value or exchange rate”
5. “Currency needs an assigned value to be understood, a language to speak.”
6. “Once these values are assigned, essentially everything will become money, and currency itself will cease to exist.”
7. “I don’t believe that the world will end up with a single global currency.” — presumably because it will cease to exist?
8. “How much do you have to Like the Olive Garden to get a lasagna? We’ll know soon.”
9. “As for the concept of nations, built on tax and central monetary authority? Could the Internet itself someday control “our nation”?
And my personal favorite, 10. “The answer, as far as I can see, is a systemic rigidity of crushing proportion.”
yeah, rich pickins that Stalnaker,
i agree that ‘crushing’ bit is rich, specially in the light of what i noted in august 2010, when i first discovered he had a knack for doing this kind of pow(d)erful borrowing from his peers (tweaks are better than attributions though eh? It’s the age of anything goes nothing rhymes after all and before better or worse.
rock = hard — pebble = card — sand = p2p
the eyeball currency is called serio
one more for reputation and another for experience
From 1999 to 2001, Stalnaker curated a web column in Asia Pacific for cnn.com and time.com called Culture on Demand, and he remains a regular contributor to magazines in North America, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. His views on P2P were named the lead Breakthrough Idea of 2008 by the Harvard Business Review, �and other writings have appeared in the New York Times online, GQ, Internationalist, Capella, CNN Bespoke, Enigma and other publications.
eric harris braun involved as well … seems to enjoy ‘riante leefomgeving’ (good living conditions) .. i have noted rushkoff and the ‘whatchamacallit currency frontier’ people work last september but this did slip by me till now
i sent him a query:
who inspired you to go for the mineral aggregation analogy pray tell?
just a reminder (quoting work i composed in the eighties, forget which)
Hi – I did not receive any email or questions from you but I am happy to answer them if you want to send through to me. You can reach me via info@hubculture.com
The Rocks/Pebble/Sand analogy you cite above refers to the general expansion of currency sets, and it was not drawn from any outside sources, I had the idea linked to the image that accompanies it. Since I am not very familiar with, nor have I used Serio, I not commented or spoken about it. It was featured in a WSJ piece some time ago that also talked about Ven, but I don’t have any personal experience with it. 🙂
read ‘vintage mudpie mintage’ for that second ‘rich’ … and no, he aint answered yet.
ah, .. this is what i sent him (in part, don’t dare paste more with lengthofobes around):
Blended dusts and distinct digits: handled the right way they may reflect singular sentience and sussed sociability. Ground gravel is usually reemployed; graded and glued right back into compaction in the form of lootcarrying and -hoarding roads or walls. Most of this potentially fertile money is not taken to the epitome of diversity distributing soilbanks but gets spent and pent right back up into the rigidity of compact and secretively symbol shuffler sheltering structures where with all bulletbiting, glare, flare and heartless cunning, the colours and spices of life are bled into one black mass of mental darkness for as long, high, far and wide as their compulsory legal tender manages to enslave and infradestruct. (see ch 6). :: :: :: :: The real rockcrushers are not performing their (p)ungrate- and progridfully quarry crunch to increase credit for biomass crescendo; …….. and onan on anon
And I assume that you’ve seen this from the Yale Law Journal from 2009 about reputation as a property in virtual economies: http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/property-law/reputation-as-property-in-virtual-economies/
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In response and reflection to your latest article and website theme :
Personal Avatars and Modern Currency (~ 1k words)
http://www.facebook.com/notes/jason-lasky/personal-avatars-modern-currency/10150199270762362
From the P2P foundation, this recent post may be of interest in the context of this discussion:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/introducing-the-third-commons/2011/05/25
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You can actually buy and trade reputations at http://www.empireavenue.com (my price today $30.19). Using weighted scores on terms of contributions to Facebook, linked in etc the “system” provides a social network score which is used by investors to make buy-sell decisions. No actual money needs to trade hands, though you can buy “eaves” (the sites currency) so as to increase your trade position. Investments produce dividends…
Worth a look…a friend is doing her PhD in this topic…
Stephen
I personally believe that reputation can be a global currency. As a matter of fact, I have been writing my thesis to develop algorithms that that can facilitate such a reputation-base economy. If you are interested, my email is tuantrung.tran [at] gmail [dot] com
Of course, the idea of reputation currency has existed somewhat within the credit system of money. However, the “reputation” contained within each money paper or monetary data cannot be transmitted in a way that retain the reputation value. For example, a thief snatching your money or some organization printing money illegally can easily violate the traditional monetary system.
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