A World (Online) Without Money

I'm not sure he realizes what money is. Listia credits are money. It is actually the same system we use today. Dollars have no inherent use, but people value them because you can trade them for physical items that do have use. This is exactly what the Listia credits are. The only difference is that there has been no exchange rate set up between that and other forms of money, but I am willing to bet that this will come to.<p>Money is a mode of trade. When you sell somebody a computer, and use that money to buy a hamburger (a really expensive gourmet one) you are in essence trading that computer for a hamburger. (Ok, it is a little more complicated, but not much.)<p>Money is a good thing. To quote a certain author (who I won't name because it will cause more debate than it really deserves.) "Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value."<p>This so called "Age of abundance" is a dream that can not exist. And even if it could, I am not sure I would want to live in it. To live in a world in which everything is provided for me, with no work and no effort, is to live in a world with no purpose. It sounds more like hell to me.<p>There were other issues, but I don't have time right now to deal with them.

"Why would you want to do away with money? As it turns out money is too powerful an incentive. When you throw money into the equation, it tends to drown out other motivations such altruism, social norms and reputation. Dan Ariely has a wonderful example of this in his book “Predictably Irrational” where he describes how a nursery school tried to use cash penalties to prevent parents from dropping off their kids late. With the cash penalty the number of late drop offs went up (!) because now parents felt like they were paying for a service. The money completely overwhelmed feeling bad for imposing upon the teachers. Amazingly, money was so powerful that even when the school dropped the cash penalties the late drop offs stayed above their initial level."<p>Is it just me or does anyone find something wrong with analysis of the underlying motivations for this para?<p>My read is: The introduction of money changed the dynamics of dropping their kids off late from a moral obligation to a business transaction. It being a business transaction, the penalty now becomes the loss of some money as compared to a hit to your moral standing. For busy parents, they may prefer the monetary loss as compared to feeling like a bad parent. Hence the number of people dropping their kids off late increased. If this could be true, then money may NOT be the that powerful an incentive. In this case, moral reputation/standing is a more powerful incentive. The school should be appealing to that rather than using money as a penalty.

I think the focus of his post, which is that there are very powerful social forces at play that guide human behavior outside of a monetary transaction, is spot-on -- but it always has been like that.<p>What I greatly disagree w/ though is whether this is anything new at all or that the world is fundamentally heading towards an "age of abundance".<p>Why StackOverflow is kicking ass is the same reason we love HN. It's the community. That's it. No flimsy game mechanics. No monetary rewards or points involved (though like any large social group, there are demarcations for roles and status, like the HN karma). It's the gravitational pull of a strong community with shared interests. This is all textbook Seth Godin, nothing new here.<p>Strong communities have been budding since the dawn of civilization... so it's weird to say that the online world is pioneering this in any way for the offline world. What it is doing though is accelerating the community because of the sheer global scale of the web, which is unprecedented.<p>Money will always be driving the world, but more community-building tipping points to come.

Money is not disappearing, but it is simply evolving.<p>We're now seeing an economy based on the idea of money secured by cryptography evolving in a tiny corner of the internet. Most hackers here are not aware that such an economy exists.

My project for a new form of money:<p><a href="http://ripple-project.org/" rel="nofollow">http://ripple-project.org/</a><p>Everyone issues their own personal currency, but you only accept the currency of people you trust to make good on their obligations to you personally. For those you don't trust, the system finds intermediaries to exchange the buyer's obligations for those acceptable to the seller.<p>Lots of work needs to be done to make this useful, but I've had a system operating for several years now at <a href="http://ripplepay.com" rel="nofollow">http://ripplepay.com</a>. Comments always welcome.

<i>Online (at least on the margin), the cost of resources is already sufficiently close to zero so as to not matter.</i><p>If that's the case, why does StackOverflow need venture funding? VCs investing money in such sites are surely looking for returns in money. So, what's the OP really trying to say?<p>I must be missing something. Can someone please explain?

Call me paranoid, but I'm wary of Listia. Who regulates the issuance of credits which are used to purchase actual goods? (answer: Listia) What legal repercussions are stopping them from issuing credits to whoever they want? (answer: none)