[12923] in Cypherpunks
Re: the value of money
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Russell Nelson)
Tue May 3 07:10:46 1994
Date: Tue, 3 May 94 00:20 EDT
From: nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson)
To: hfinney@shell.portal.com
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <199405022055.NAA29272@jobe.shell.portal.com> (message from Hal on Mon, 2 May 1994 13:55:34 -0700)
Date: Mon, 2 May 1994 13:55:34 -0700
From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Why don't we brainstorm a bit to see if we could come up with a way
to take this digital cash software and do something useful and interesting
with it. It seems like too good an opportunity to just let it sit there and
do nothing. I know there has been some abstract discussion about cash
systems in the past, but now we have something concrete and we should be
to discuss it more specifically.
There have been several private-currancies in the recent past. One of
them was written up in Utne Reader, quoting the Whole Earth Review.
I've got the information squirreled away somewhere. That one was
interesting because it had a zero-sum money supply. There was no
scrip -- all trades were registered with a central authority. If I
traded a thing of value to you, my balance went up and yours went
down. Debt was repudiatable only by leaving the system, and your
balance and trading rate was explicitly public information. No one
could be forced to trade with anyone else, and trading with someone
(or not) based on their balance and trading rate was encouraged.
Inflation was not a problem because the money supply remained at zero.
The most telling remark from the originator (a Canadian) was that the
system worked best when you had someone with deep pockets who was
willing to run up a big positive balance by trading away things of
value for the private currancy.
So to get digital cash going, (IMHO) we need someone willing to risk a
bunch of bucks to get people in debt to the system. Maybe someone
with some spare cash could print up a hundred Digital Cash T-shirts
(maybe a bit-mapped image of Johnny Cash? :) worth, say, $7, and sell
them for $10 bucks in digital cash. The profit that would
(eventually, hopefully) bring would be their return on their risk.
There are other schemes that would work.
-russ <nelson@crynwr.com> ftp.msen.com:pub/vendor/crynwr/crynwr.wav
Crynwr Software | Crynwr Software sells packet driver support | ask4 PGP key
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