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Re:Nickels I know, but you have farthings?!!! by UnknownSoldier · 2007-01-26 05:18 · Score: 1 · on US Pennies To Be Worth Five Cents?

> Those are not legal tender, and it is in fact illegal for anyone except for the Federal Gov't to print money.

Uhm, NO.

1) That only applies to inter-state commerce.
2) Go learn what a BARTER system is.
3) Now go learn about LETS -- Local Exchange Trading System

If a group of people decide to use a common object amongst themselves, that is PERFECTLY legal and valid, as long as people don't try to claim it as being "legal tender" -- of which ONLY 1) Gold, and 2) Silver are. Calling something "money" is just an abstract name for what is really going on: "a common medium for exchange of goods or services." The government does not have the power to regulate PRIVATE CONTRACTS (I will give you X for y), when no rights or life have been threatened by the parties, regardless of what it is called.

I recommend you watch the Copyleft 2003 Canadian Documentary Money by Isaac Isitan , (65 mins)

--
Income Tax and Fractional Reserve Banking are examples of some of the the world's greatest Ponzi Scams ever pulled.

Re:Economics ... setting the record straight by khallow · 2006-09-28 23:54 · Score: 1 · on A View From Under the Long Tail

Yes, theoretically fiat currency could be as scarce as gold and not be overproduced. But could you name even one fiat currency that isn't inflating and hasn't been inflating? I didn't think so. Why then would you propose that paper money and gold money is more or less equivalent when they clearly are not other than in theory?

It's not clear to me that lack of inflation is a good thing. One of the problems with a noninflating currency is that isolated communities (hmmm, maybe parts of society with low money velocity?) run out of it. Some parts of the developed world are resorting to their own currencies. A number of massively multiplayer games literally have currrencies that inflate and deflate as sources and sinks are changed in size.

For example, there's a graph of "meat", the food-based currency versus the US dollar over the past year for the web game, Kingdom of Loathing. It shows a period of considerable deflation from September 2005 to January of this year. Since then, it has steadily increased over time. There actually were two periods of inflation that I know of. The first was know as "bugmeat" and was an extraordinary period of hyperinflation that occured over a single day in August 2004. Rather than roll back the game (maybe they didn't have good backups?) to before "Black Sunday", the key developer decided to employ a host of "meatsinks" to drain the excess meat from the game. This period of deflation continued through the end of 2005 (the graph just shows the vestige of it).

This is a good example of a fiat currency that doesn't automatically inflate and actually experienced a substantial period of extreme deflation. It has inflated at points in the past, but that would happen with any current that fluctuates in value and with which it is possible for a bug to generate a few orders of magnitude more meat on one person than existed prior in the game. The game developers had a good deal of control over how meat is created and consumed. Rather than reduce the supply of meat, they introduced new ways that the meat could be consumed. In recent time, the developers have introduced new sinks and reduced substantially one of the most popular meat sources.

Re:Ethnically segregated? by Guillaume+Laurent · 2005-11-16 09:42 · Score: 1 · on French Riots Lead to Crackdown on Blogs

Resources are scarce. They're limited. We do not have unlimited resources.

Seriously, what's the color of the sky on your planet ? Energy is no longer scarce. Neither is food. Of course they are not infinite, but certainly not scarce.

All of these services are made possible by people working. Unfortunately, people cannot work more than 24 hours a day, so these resources are limited (scarce)

Riiight. And all these routers have little people in them working their asses off to quickly duplicate the packets. Perhaps I should think about feeding the little fairy in my HD who nicely copies all those files for me.

That's funny, most of those statistics made statements about the current state of affairs, and did not compare the plight of the poor today to their plight in the past.

I think this one is revealing enough, even though you disagree :

For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980].

Certainly nothing noted a reverse trend

So these countries should consider themselves happy that their progress is only slowing, since after all it's not going back ?

All of the wealthiest countries had the least restrictive trade laws, and all of the poorest countries had the most restrictive trade laws, funny how that works. And what's more, the countries with less regulated economies were more wealthy. I wonder what that means.

That in the past 20 years, the IMF destroyed the economy of those countries, precisely by opening them to international competition, which means for instance that countries which were able to feed themselves no longer can because we're literally forcing them to buy the surplus of our agriculture. And as I said in an other post, the US has is very protectionist toward importations, thus has restrictive trade laws.

Also, I think it's funny when people say that the world produces enough food for all it's people, and yet many go hungry

Do you know anything about the 3rd world problems ? http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/TWN031704.cfm

Less restrictive trade laws would help this problem because it would allow producers in countries with too much food to sell to people in the countries with too little food.

That's precisely what's currently happening, and what keeps these countries in perpetual assisted state.

I think you'd see their unemployment rate come down if they cut some of their social programs.

No, we'd see criminality and poverty go up. Our social programs can certainly be made more effective (as they clearly don't work properly), but not by cutting them down (as the example of northern europeean countries shows).

Now we just need to figure out a way to get the food to everybody. Capitalism worked for the first half of the equation, and it can and will work for the second half.

Capitalism in its current implementation is making things worse, and it can be made better.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/soros.htm
and http://www.transaction.net/money/book/ since I've referred to it quite a lot.

Re:Ethnically segregated? by Guillaume+Laurent · 2005-11-12 12:38 · Score: 1 · on French Riots Lead to Crackdown on Blogs

It doesn't matter because you do not have to take out a loan to make money. If you work a job[...]

You don't get it. ALL money is created by bank loan (except for gold reserves but these are hardly relevant nowadays, given the total volume of transactions).

What that means is that without an unskilled labour force, things would be more expensive (relatively speaking) for people who are not members of the working class ... so less people would be able to buy things, so the company making them would make less money, so their employees would have smaller salaries, so they would even less be able to afford those things, etc... and there goes the economy.

Okay, care to justify that? The wikipedia article didn't really say how effective they were. How can complimentary currencies eliminate unskilled labour?

I didn't phrase that correctly. Complementary currencies help making unskilled people less poor. I can refer you again to his book (though he may be too optimistic about their virtues, but he does have very good points). You can also look at this page : http://www.transaction.net/money/
Or this discussion over an interview of Lietaer : http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/27395 (as you will see from the comments, these currencies aren't the panacea either, but they're an interesting option nonetheless).

No. Yes. by temojen · 2004-10-01 06:20 · Score: 2, Informative · on U.S. Offers $50 Download

Ithica hours

Saltspring Dollars

LETS

An overview of alternative currencies

Re:A bazaar in cathedral clothing... by ecesar · 2003-11-13 08:11 · Score: 1 · on The Open Code Market

Very true. But I believe this paper underrates the strength of (as Eric Raymond calls it) the gift culture. Essentially, OpenSource developers compete to give the biggest gift to the community. The bigger the gift, the more their standing within the community rises. This has worked pretty well the past 13 years or so.

A gift culture is not orthogonal with a money-based economy. There is an interesting work by Bernard Lietaer (The Future of Money) that deals with the effect of complementary community-based currencies. In summary, if a community creates a local currency with which to back local transactions and reward gift-givers, the tradition can even be strengthened.

The key, for him, is "community-based". He gives some examples in the web site above. These currencies are non-scarce (currency is created when a transaction happens) and backed by the work capacity of people (some of these currencies are traded in work-hour equivalents), not by bank debt or government fiat.

I've been thinking about means to apply this to the open-source community, but I'm not an economist. Basically, you would receive "open source credits" for creating new code, and you could use these credits to pay for the creation of code that interests you. This is basically trading your time with the time of others, and fits well with what Lietaer describes in his book.

the memory bank by lopati · 2003-08-10 15:26 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology During the 1900's

keith hart i think should have been one of the speakers, here's an excerpt from "the memory bank":

The idea of money as a source of social memory was also crucial for John Locke, who figures prominently in our story as the philosopher who inaugurated the modern age of democratic revolutions. Locke was obsessed with money's role both in establishing a progressive social order and in subverting it as its criminal antithesis. Indeed, he believed that money launched humanity from the state of nature onto the road to civil government. As long as men's possessions were limited to perishable products, the scope for property was restricted. Money, by offering a durable store of value convertible against all useful things, unleashed the potential for property accumulation and for the intergenerational transmission of inequality. For Locke, then, money was indispensable to that development of cultural memory on which civilization depends.

also btw, bernard lietaer should've been a speaker as well! (altho he is on the board :)

the memory bank by lopati · 2003-08-10 15:26 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology During the 1900's

keith hart i think should have been one of the speakers, here's an excerpt from "the memory bank":

The idea of money as a source of social memory was also crucial for John Locke, who figures prominently in our story as the philosopher who inaugurated the modern age of democratic revolutions. Locke was obsessed with money's role both in establishing a progressive social order and in subverting it as its criminal antithesis. Indeed, he believed that money launched humanity from the state of nature onto the road to civil government. As long as men's possessions were limited to perishable products, the scope for property was restricted. Money, by offering a durable store of value convertible against all useful things, unleashed the potential for property accumulation and for the intergenerational transmission of inequality. For Locke, then, money was indispensable to that development of cultural memory on which civilization depends.

also btw, bernard lietaer should've been a speaker as well! (altho he is on the board :)

Some interesting stuff by IamTheRealMike · 2003-02-09 22:18 · Score: 1 · on The Future of Money

There are some fascinating links here in a Kuro5hin story on this very topic

I haven't seen much discussion here about alternatiev economic systems. Most of the talk is about whether we have cash or electronic cards. Why not talk about more interesting stuff, like altering the way money itself works. Ever heard of demurrage? Neither had I until I read some stuff over at transaction.net - the concept of negative currency is a fascinating one.

If you've ever read the Mars trilogy, you'll probably have some idea of the kinds of things I'm thinking about: limitations on the size of corporations and so on. Basically Capitalism version 2 (or 3).

money is an agreement by zerone · 2001-02-25 00:25 · Score: 2 · on The Mystery of Capital

Bernard Lietaer at transaction.net has plenty of interesting ideas about money, drawn from his involvment in the global monetary system five ways: from a multinational corporation to a developing country viewpoint, from an academic to a hands-on central banking and currency speculation viewpoint.. He concludes that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using, and that we can use the 'net to create abundant, sustainable alternatives.

The trick seems to be to limit "money"'s capacity as a *store of value* and so expand it's use as a *medium of exchange.*

Silvio Gissel's "demurrage currency" model does this. Demurrage charged currency restricts a user's freedom to hoard short-term gains, and coerces users to invest in more *sustainable* productive actions in the long run. (Demurrage currency devalues with time, so it spreads around faster, increasing in velocity, and hence, ironically, value.

barataria.org used to have good info on the famous Worgl experiment, whose success caused the Austrian Central Bank to stomp it out. "The traders took no risk in accepting Wörgl scrip as it was completely backed by the national currency loan which the mayor had obtained from the savings bank and left on deposit there. This enabled anyone holding scrip to swap it at any time for 98% of its face value in national currency. Very few people appear to have made the exchange because at 2% it cost more to do so than to pay the 1% monthly re-validation fee, but any local money which was returned to the bank or paid to the council in taxation was immediately re-launched into circulation in the town."

IHMO, "money" is an elemental "code" that instructs most of our trades.. I look forward to new definitions and arrangements of it.. Redefined, it can promote cooperation over competition, and suit non-zero-sum increasing returns in network effects (ie free ideas grow more valuable as more people use them)

"Imagine how creative, how productive, how ecologically benign our businesses could be if we ran them according to the design principles of the rainforest. With thin soil, few nutrients, and almost no resources, rainforests could never qualify for a loan. Yet rainforests are more productive than any business in the world, home to millions of species of plants and animals, so perfectly mixed that they sustain one another and evolve into ever more complex forms." - Taichi Kiuchi

money is an agreement by zerone · 2001-02-25 00:25 · Score: 2 · on The Mystery of Capital

Bernard Lietaer at transaction.net has plenty of interesting ideas about money, drawn from his involvment in the global monetary system five ways: from a multinational corporation to a developing country viewpoint, from an academic to a hands-on central banking and currency speculation viewpoint.. He concludes that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using, and that we can use the 'net to create abundant, sustainable alternatives.

The trick seems to be to limit "money"'s capacity as a *store of value* and so expand it's use as a *medium of exchange.*

Silvio Gissel's "demurrage currency" model does this. Demurrage charged currency restricts a user's freedom to hoard short-term gains, and coerces users to invest in more *sustainable* productive actions in the long run. (Demurrage currency devalues with time, so it spreads around faster, increasing in velocity, and hence, ironically, value.

barataria.org used to have good info on the famous Worgl experiment, whose success caused the Austrian Central Bank to stomp it out. "The traders took no risk in accepting Wörgl scrip as it was completely backed by the national currency loan which the mayor had obtained from the savings bank and left on deposit there. This enabled anyone holding scrip to swap it at any time for 98% of its face value in national currency. Very few people appear to have made the exchange because at 2% it cost more to do so than to pay the 1% monthly re-validation fee, but any local money which was returned to the bank or paid to the council in taxation was immediately re-launched into circulation in the town."

IHMO, "money" is an elemental "code" that instructs most of our trades.. I look forward to new definitions and arrangements of it.. Redefined, it can promote cooperation over competition, and suit non-zero-sum increasing returns in network effects (ie free ideas grow more valuable as more people use them)

"Imagine how creative, how productive, how ecologically benign our businesses could be if we ran them according to the design principles of the rainforest. With thin soil, few nutrients, and almost no resources, rainforests could never qualify for a loan. Yet rainforests are more productive than any business in the world, home to millions of species of plants and animals, so perfectly mixed that they sustain one another and evolve into ever more complex forms." - Taichi Kiuchi

ot? by zerone · 2001-02-02 01:09 · Score: 1 · on Can You Suggest Any Non-Zero Sum Games?

No wonder "it is a tough world out there", and
that Darwin's observation of "survival of the
fittest" was so readily accepted as self-evident
Truth by the Victorian English--and by any other
people who live within a money system of their
own design, such as us today. In fact, there is
not much "out there" that supports such a cynical
interpretation, claims Professor of bio-sociology
Imanishi, from Kyoto University. He has shown that
the Darwinian vision of nature as a struggle for
life simply has been completely blind to the many
more frequent cases of co-evolution, of symbiosis,
of joint development and harmonious coexistence
which prevail in all domains of evolution. Even
our own body today would not be able to survive
long without the symbiotic collaboration of
billions of micro-organism in our digestive tract
for example.

http://www.transaction.net/money/book/rethink2b.ht ml

Altruism breeds altruism, and reciprocal acts breed
reciprocal acts. "If we feel that other people are
only out for themselves, one is wary of being
altruistic. If we feel other people are not giving,
we say, 'I'm not going to be a sucker,' " says Cronin.
"The more people understand that we are evolved
altruists, and the more people feel that no one is
taking advantage of another, the more we will become
altruistic, and the more we won't take advantage of
one another."

Why has nature designed something so useless? As
useless as being nice to the other guy? As useless
as sharing information? As useless as committing
your life to pursuing an idea whose outcome you can't
possibly know? Reputation, says Cronin, is a key
element in competition. "Once you understand that
sexual selection is displaying qualities like kindness
or goodness, or is demonstrating that you can afford
to give things away, then you understand the close
connection between flamboyance and altruism. Altruism
can be one of those evolved peacock feathers in our
minds."

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/29/paranoia.html

"ownership" in trade of free ideas by zerone · 2000-01-18 10:19 · Score: 2 · on Linux Trademark Domain Crackdown

redundant

The LINX debacle affirms the idea that *reputation*, above and beyond human *attention*, is the chief currency in this idea economy. Clearly LinuxOne is getting attention, but of a bitter sort. (then again, press is often measured by quantity, not quality.)

Maybe Dr. Chiou's LINX will do little damage to Linux' reputation. But if he achieves his purpose, even slightly, many might follow suit. Snowball. After all, the "world domination" market is immense, comprising *billions* of newbies. The barrier to entry, as LINX proves, barely exists. Maybe "world partnership" would have been smarter.

Bernardo Huberman concludes that the bigger a system is, the more individuals within it will poach, simply because they can get away with it. Guilt free. The bigger Linux gets, (the way it's currently being financed), the more it may suffer infestation by parasites.

"Money" wants one thing: to maximize its return with minimal effort, and limited liability. "It goes where it's wanted, and stays where it's cared for." Gold rules. The rich get richer, and the poor get, uh.. motivation to get rich.. (and so on, until we reboot "money")

Meanwhile, how do we use yesterday's money to trade today's free ideas? How does open source get monetized? Are there choices?

Are "property"-centered IPO's and stockholder "ownership" the *ideal* way to finance trade in free ideas? Are they the *fairest* of possible arrangements? Are they the *only* kind of financial relationships imaginable? Maybe not.

Could the Open Source principle of "common ownership" conceivably adapt to the structure of a "business relationship"?

Maybe so. "Common ownership" is a key organizing principle of one of the most successful enterprises in history, which incidentally has plenty to do with software, entrepreneurial freedom, ingenuity, trade, globalization and money itself..

VISA defined "ownership" as a nontransferable *right* to participate, and an *obligation* to abide by community-defined terms. Legally, it was structured as a non-stock, for-profit membership corporation. So it can't be bought, sold, traded or raided. No pump, no dump. VISA has grown 20-50%, compounding annually, for over 30 years, past boom, bubble, bear and bust: $1,400,000,000,000 (trillion) in 1998 sales.

Dee Hock, who founded this semi-choard, believes that if "ownership" had been extended to *all* participants (including merchants and cardholders), then it would be *four times* more successful today. It would be truly chaordic.

(So does "common ownership" always mean "Communism"? Maybe not. Meanwhile, das Capital floods into Linux, which is rooted in the freaking GPL.. wierd. Maybe money follows ingenuity, regardless of ideology..)

Why do open licenses like the GPL so attract that most valuable resource, human ingenuity? Common ownership? Promotion of sharing? Trade rooted in ethics? Relief from pricey legal haggling? Rebellion? Civil disobedience? Cooperative advantage? Creative liberty? Maybe it boils down to freedom from restrictions.

"Freedom"? Are you *free* to scream "fire" in a crowded house or to punch the tip of my nose? Kinda.. Dee Hock (after Lao Tzu) claims that in reality, "everything is its opposite". Freedom is a fruit of self-restraint. By forced sharing, the GPL righteously claims to be more "free" than BSD. BSD rabidly disagrees. Considering the LinuxONE problem at hand, is the "GPV" dispute relevant?

Dr. Chiou and company seem to be breaking an *unwritten* community contract. He's free to do so. Any surprise at all, considering recent capital flows to RHAT and LNUX? To equitably and successfully enable monetized, fair, reputable and trustworthy trade in free ideas, maybe alternative contracts (open licenses) need to be written and tried.

No, not like the SCSL (a legal document that claims to create a "chaord". Dubious. Sun is infected with the "responsibility-to-stockholder" virus, which makes it difficult to truly extend equitable ownership to all participants.)

Who knows? What if, in the beginning, Linus added a few fairness enhancing restrictions to the GPL:

Call this OS anything you want, but please include the name "linux" in whatever you call it.
Please claim to your free subdomain (reputation) in our community-owned, mother-of-all-intranets at http://our.linux.org/dns (eg: va.linux.org = valinux.com etc)
Let's chaorganize ourselves to free our idea exchange, while forging a commercial agreement to immunize ourselves from free-riders like Dr. Chiou.. This process might take us a year..

Maybe the resulting agreement would be as simple as "our free software is GPL, but if you have yet to agree to our terms, you are not yet free to call it "Linux" nor free to pretend that you are a Penguin. (no fraud, please) You are free to join us if you choose to at http://our.linux.org/agreement/LPL

Reputation management? What's in a name? Giving credit where credit is due? Patent and Copyright "properties" may perpetuate outdated economic models of scarcity, but Trademarks? Might they grow more valuable as info gluts?

What if the idea that *no one owns linux* switched to the idea that *we own linux*? What if we agreed to restrict abuse of "our" name, (and the values it represents)? Would [insert project "x", eg "linux"] then be better cared for?

These are just questions from an outsider looking in. Point is, a *truly* chaordic (distributed ownership, equitable rewards) community license to develop/use a free software system might enhance the *trust* between all participants, particularly when money enters the mix.

Maybe such an agreement could not be strictly defined as "Free" or "Open Source", (due to the tradename requirement/url verification), but maybe some resulting immunity to commercial parasites is worth that price. Maybe such an agreement could be called "Open Code" (for software *and* organizational code.)

Whatever.. open principles make better software, and they oughta extend to embrace business structures and practices.. which seems like it could happen with this chaordic stuff.. (chaorganization, coincidentally, requires a fundamental reconception of "ownership")

Why beware of VC money? It typically wants us to "acquire" customers, in hopes that shareholders will want to "own" a piece of us. Don't buy it! Pop that bubble! Customers are not "property", and neither are we.

"Ownership" in the chaordic sense will extend freedom (and *trust*) farther faster.

If that's our purpose, how can we then raise enough cash to incorporate our ideas into legal fictions (businesses) which may serve to help us reputably trade our ingenuity? Savings. Loans. Credit Cards. VC royalty financing. URL Bonds? Membership fees. Service contracts. Ad revenues. "Free" products for sale. Faith. Whatever it takes.. but don't sell off a single limb, not even a single digit. Extend ownership to customers, not stock-holders. Serve people. It will prove more profitable.

chaorganize!

[sources: LINX . "attEnTiOn"-NoT . StiG . BiOnOMiCs . CHaOs-is-G00D . PaRtneRsHiP . FrEELoAdiNG . MoNeY . ComMuNiTy-CuRReNcY . iNteLLeCtuAL-VaLuE . RHaT-IpO . AddApT . CHaRacTeRIStiCs-o-ChaORgAniZATiOn . ViSA . DeE-HoCK . CoMMiE-UniTy? . GpL=BiG-BuCk$?? . MiNDcRaFTiNg . EcOnOmY-oF-iDeAs . ETHiCs-of-iP . ScSL . CoOpeRaTiVe-adVaNtaGe . CHaOrDiC-PrOCeSs . wHaT'sa-NaMe? . CrEdiT-DuE? . OPEN-CoDE . ETHiCs :thanks]

re:TM , � and oppression of women by zerone · 1999-10-18 08:12 · Score: 1 · on Trend: More Software Patents

sounds like an interesting read.. (if rather daunting.) "The Alphabet versus the Goddess" by Leonard Schlain is another good read.. (maybe more of a historical romp and riff on duality masculine/feminine, yin/yang, left/right, text/image, etc/etc.)..

anyway, the idea of claiming ideas as property is IMO a symptom of a dangerously recalcitrant (stick-in-the-mud) partriarchy, and largely unconscious form of rape, fueled by male fear and greed.. unnecessary delusions, yet so culturally entrenched and *so* costly . There are much smarter alternatives.. the way to implement 'em is evolve money.

confession: i am part of this sad sad trend.. by zerone · 1999-10-18 06:52 · Score: 2 · on Trend: More Software Patents

I've been working for about five years on a "human language learning exchange" project, which turned into software, which recently turned (partly) into a pending u.s. patent. The basic "method" claimed ain't rocket science, but it did take a lot of error and even more trial to come up with. And trust me, it's really *sucked* working on the chicken side of the egg. I'd prefer not to get screwed in the end. Still, there are so many reasons *not* to file internet software patents, especially as churn churns churn faster:

* if the world wide web or linux were patented, who'd use 'em? free ideas are far more powerful.

* patents perpetuate outdated economic models, imposing artificial scarcity upon abundant bits.

* the Internet is transforming human societies much faster than local laws or terrestrial governments can adapt.

* (in fact, we might experience widespread institutional failure and soon.)

* not all jurisdictions recognize the international patents, so they're difficult to enforce on the web.

* it costs a fortune to file, prosecute manage and enforce patents in multiple the jursidictions of the world.

* patent laws discriminate against the poor: those who can't pay up can't legally "protect" innovations. (this ain't a big deal today, but wait 10 years when bandwidth is 60,000 times more plentiful, tripling yearly its reach)

* patent claims set a precedent, thus inviting future patents to attempt to monopolize derivative works.

* patents perpetuate ideals of marketplace "dominance". "partnership" may give rise much more valuable trade.

* patent impose an outdated a "zero sum" game. Learning grows more valuable as more people share it.

* trademarks are a far more "defense worthy", as they identify reputable brand (increasingly valuable as info gluts)

so.. why'd i file? believe me, i been on the fence.. (and sick to the stomach) but finally decided a patent pending might buy some time and keep some options open.. (besides, the thing took forever to write, and *damned* dull it was.. (no wonder the patent office is overwhelmed.. (have you ever read a patent?)))

Anyway, i'm 100% sure that, um.. "my" project should chaorganize and go open source, and aim to host a license selection forum real soon, but here's my question now:

there's been some talk of an Open Source Patent Pool to cross-license w/ the closed stuff.. (are there any "open" patents in this pipeline yet? (any chance at "first post"8P?)).. Anyone have more info?

[btw- IMO, open source patent pooling *might* be an effective "defensive" strategy, but remember the "enemy" has deeeep pockets. Better choose playing field wisely.. the way to outmaneuver *money* is increasingly to outsmart it..]

Re:The transaction doenst have to be zero sum. by Malcontent · 1999-10-17 03:10 · Score: 1 · on Why You Are Not On Any Forbes Lists of Rich People

Nobody was talking about value. The fact is the rich got rich because everybody else gave them some money in return for something. I have given MS thousands of dollars of my hard earned money. I tried my best to pass those costs on to people who I did business with. The fact remains somebody in the end lost and somebody in the end won. Bill G. won because he got my money. My customers lost because they I recouped my losses on their backs. In the end of course the consumers all lost because they could not pass along those expenses.

As for how money gets created. Money get created by fiat by the central banks and the govt. The economy is not a zero sum game but It is a game. Money gets created whenever interest is charged. When you are charged interest you are expected to somehow "find" this extra money. To do this you have to fight with everybody else to get theirs after all you are not allowed to create it by just printing up some. In short money flows from those who are charged interest to those charging interest.

Thing like productivity require either people (who need to eat, drink and breathe) or machinery (which needs energy and materials). Even though the economy is not a zero sum game the natural resouces game is.
If you want a great explanation of how money works check this out

why not vote with your feet? by zerone · 1999-10-11 00:07 · Score: 1 · on Still Can't Export Open-Source Crypto

My plan exactly. Walk. The US is trying to protect its monopoly on a.) the dollar supreme and b.) a hairball tax code, revenue stream. Are less violent trading routes imaginable?

Bit trading brains-r-us are close to implementing alternative mediums of exchange (see saxas), other possibilities for paying the piper (see taxes) and disciplines that might increase the velocity and value (and reduce the ecological cost) of "money".

Encryption is how currency "borders" are enforced on the Net, thus cryptography is the only way any trading system can protect its turf. Personally, I'd like to see 7 or 8 billion traders exercize that right, using an abundance of free space quantum cryptography :)

Re:E-barter by Malcontent · 1999-09-29 13:33 · Score: 1 · on Open Source E-commerce Engine Announced

Money is good except that it has one severe drawback. Interest. Communitites accross the US and on the internet have been experimenting with alternate currencies and barter systems. You can go to http://www.transaction.net/ and read some very interesting articles about this subject.

A barter system works great if you set up an alternate currency. The internet is the ideal medium for such a thing.

Re:IPOs.. alternatives conceivable? by zerone · 1999-09-23 14:18 · Score: 1 · on McAfee files for 57.5 Million IPO

IPO's can be used by *people with a surplus of stored value (ca$h or credit) to multiply said surplus as much and as fast as possible and preferably with the least possible effort. If successful, such users earn themselves even more "freedom". (from what: fear? envy? lack of sex appeal? who knows?;) anyways..

Companies which conduct these IPO's exploit such human virtues to raise money (needed to finance international legal and customer aquisition costs.. (remember, you are now an Internet company dotcom(tm), or you are roadkill, and this web grows global fast)). Founders and early investors of Internet companies can also use these IPO's to amass fabulous fortunes for themselves to diversify and secure by investing in new IPO's, politicians , etc.

Now, partially owned by the "public" (see above*), stock prices reflect "our" confidence in the company's potential to profit. Company managers, typically holding stakes of their own, spur the company to attract the highest possible share price. Bottom line. Period.

Whether our grandchildren or theirs will regard this behavior as blatently criminal is another question.

Whether there are alternatives to inequity exacerbating IPO and "street" methods of idea "ownership" is a question I hope /. will address and soon. After all, the MAN(tm), his law(tm) and by-laws(IPO Corp.) are forms of "code", right? (They instruct energetic systems to behave predictably. Or try to.)

So how do IPO's and like ownership models perpetuate "code"? Openly? How does it affect our capacity to trade our learning and creativity? Are there alternatives? Here may be a interesting one:

"Chaord" or "chaordic". [haHA! 2nd post:] It's shocking that Dotters of Slash completely ignore an archetypical business structure that seems to effectively trade creativity and borderlessly: Visa International. Growth? 20% annually, since way before any long boom, past $ 1.2trillion in '98 sales, no end in sight. Method? Better attract human ingenuity, (the most valuable AND abundant resource on the planet.) Blend competition with cooperation, seamlessly. Failure? Dee Hock, who founded Visa, says it could have been four times more powerful if ownership had been extended to merchants and cardholders.. Customers owning the business? COOL! bu..WTF!? How to hack that???

IPO? Stock? Forget it. Visa can't bought, sold, traded or raided. Ownership is shared in non-transferable rights of participation.

It's a very unusual "learning organization": commanders don't control it from the center. Instead, chaos organizes itself at the edges, adapting locally, learning and evolving. Advantages arise out of individual initiative. Ideally, "chaorganizations" are "equitable owned by all participants." Sound like a more "open source" code for biz? IMHO, /. and RHAT and MP3c may have kinda choked if they didn't consider more "open" ownership models, proven successful by Visa..

Anyway, a more positive way to look at IPO's and Public Companies is as forms of "currency". If you have some to spare, you could buy gold, but you have to pay someone to guard it, and gold's value is dropping. You could guard U.S.Gov't(tm) printed dead prezidents, but why do it when your banker will pay you interest to borrow them? Still, who wants a measly 6% when brand-name "currency" like yahoo! or rhat or idealab! may earn me 600%? In this light, it's more rewarding to invest in people and ideas rather than self-obsoleting systems or hoarding stores of value. Currency users now have more options, can better "vote with their pocketbook", perpetuate what they value, and maybe earn themselves some more "freedom". More options, more freedom? Who knows?

links, again, on dee hock, visa, and chaords:
http://www.chaordic.org/chaordic /chaos_is_good.htm
http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm ">
http://www.fastcompany.com/online /05/deehock.html