New Digital Currency Bases Value On Reputation

An anonymous reader writes: If digital currencies are fundamentally different than physical ones, why do they work in the same way? That's a question being asked by Couchbase co-founder J. Chris Anderson, who's building a currency and transaction system where reputation is the fundamental unit of value. "Unlike with bitcoin—which keeps its currency scarce by rewarding it only to those who participate in what amounts to a race to solve complex cryptographic puzzles—anyone will be able to create a new Document Coin anytime they want. The value of each coin will be completely subjective, depending on who creates the coin and why. 'For example, the coin my disco singer friend created and gave me at my barbeque might be what gets me past the rope at the club,' Anderson says. A coin minted by tech pundit Tim O'Reilly might be highly prized in Silicon Valley circles, but of little interest to musicians. 'It's a bit like a combination of a social network with baseball trading.'" Anderson isn't aiming to supplant Bitcoin, or even challenge the money-exchange model that drives society. But he's hoping it will change the way people think about currency, and open up new possibilities for how we interact with each other.

Paper tracked barter

[msobkow]

This sounds like paper-tracked barter, with a delayed payment on half of the deal. Which is kind of the key problem that money was intended to solve -- money can be traded for *anything*, not just what the issuer has that is of value. This ends up being a throwback to the days of "store scrip", only even more limited.

An interesting experiment, but ultimately futile and pointless.

Yeah. No thanks.

[Chas]

Considering how quickly, completely, irreparably and FALSELY someone's reputation can be savaged nowadays, this is just rife for abuse.

Re:That's Ripple

[superflippy]

I was thinking it sounded like whuffie [wikipedia.org].

So instead of Wage Slaves...

[l0ungeb0y]

We'd have "Attention Slavery" that rewards group think and attention whoring. I'd much rather have an anonymous task based system than something that rewarded sycophants and celebrities. But I recognize this might very well be the currency that Main Stream America's been waiting for.

bad design

[Tom]

A quick scan of TFA is enough to convince me this is fundamentally flawed. Case in point: He doesn't even bother to prevent double-spending, instead relying on an ill-defined concept of "people will notice and devalue you", which is basically handwaving. And that for a problem that's been solved 20 times over.

The idea is cute, but I wouldn't trust his implementation one inch.