A thought on digital currencies
While, and maybe caused by that, the world is troubled by a financial and economical crisis, people start thinking about questions of payment, of money transfer, of currencies on the net/the web.
One of the driving forces is the expected start of Facebooks digital credit system. It seems to become a part of the attention economy based idea of rewarding for action, giving a trading unit for all kinds of interaction. It’s an attempt to make attention pseudo convertible: you are paid for attention and are allowed to try to buy new attention by reinvesting. And if you need even more attention, than you are allowed to buy.
Still missing is a both way convertible currency approach (LindenLabs Second Life currency Linden Dollar was more or less the first attempt used by a larger audience). Many of us do own Credit Cards. Many of us do have a PayPal account. But there is still no way to easily do 1st micropayment 2nd moneytransfer and 3rd receivement of money. All of this is kind of overregulated in my opinion. We do not talk about real money, we talk about some cents or maybe some dollars/euros. Of course, small amounts make a large number. But still, we are lacking a real online micro credit system.
I’m still pretty impressed by the Hawala system and it’s relatives, which are merely based on belief and/or trust. I think something similar could and should be established as a way of bypassing all the problems we do have on the micro level, where technical security might be replaced by trust.
If we are able to share our private life on platforms such as facebook with our friends and the friends of our friend and their friends, we should also be able to establish a mechanism of trustee payments. If I say, I want to give 2 [currency unit] to a guy, who wrote a great blog article and is from Los Angeles. How could we do that? For example, I could ask Janko in Los Angeles to pay it to him, since he’s located within the local system. Now I owe Janko money - but maybe he also wants to transfer an amount to someone else.
This is still a not very in-depth analysis on what the future might bring. But I think the trust component should be thought carefully. Even though realism says, that a peer-to-peer currency is going to be a little harder to establish than p2p file sharing.