Suppose for a moment that there are a number of things which people ordinarily do (mostly) for free: things like contributing to open source projects, helping out associates with technical problems, even answering questions on public forums much like this one. These things, which are largely service-based usually require only minimal effort and would be too tedious / unsuitable to sell. Imagine for a moment I paid for your feedback to this thread and it suddenly seems quite absurd and rather defeats the purpose of having honest feedback (putting aside things like paid marketing - lets keep this simple
.)
But maybe there is room for a new kind of currency? One which is based not on an implied monetary value of take-take but rather on altruistic recognition of services rendered. The currency could be issued by any individual A as recognition of contributions made by any individual B, which could then be used by B to buy small favours from A at a future date. The point here wouldn't be to use this currency to buy contributions with a monetary ploy, but rather to acknowledge them so that being asked for favours won't be seem unwanted - kind of like the social credit built between friends.
Why regular money is poorly suited for this:- It can't be arbitrarily issued. This currency needs to be unique for every person so some kind of colored coin would be ideal.
- The economics are wrong. You are not buying and selling things, you are acknowledging them. Remember, this is for services that are ordinarily rendered altruistically with only implied benefits for doing so i.e. mostly for free. This system would formalize those relationships through the use of social credit.
- Even a small amount of money has a high psychological burden. If I asked for $1 from a stranger it would be met with disdain: he or she imagines all the things it could be used for due to its massive purchasing power. A currency based around favours would be a better model for the kind of reciprocal action seen in many online communities.
- It's utility based. The currency has a direct connection to roughly equivalent actions so this is potentially more practical than using regular money for the same purpose (its also hard to put a price on favours, btw, but similarly small favours could be a better yard stick.)
In practice: I imagine a system like this working extremely well for the open source community. You could work on any open source project you liked and there would be immediate and clear benefits for doing so. Having a certain amount of Favour (working title for this currency) is a powerful concept and you could easily use the Favour you've earned from multiple projects and individuals to achieve massive goals. Additionally, because Favour can be traded it would be possible to build a completely new economic model that was much more open to participation than anything that presently exists as the whole concept runs mostly counter to the psychology of money.
I've made a sample website for how I envision a currency like this being used:
www.favourcoin.com.
Tell me what you guys think.
