The first is that mining must secure the chain directly, or there will be cheating. Or at least no one can be sure that there isn't cheating, which is the same thing in that no one will trust it.
This seems tractable, thanks for pointing that out though. I think with the classification concept, it may not matter, I will definitely have to research this further.
Your other point is interesting:
And second, what you are talking about is just money. You might be willing to do a favor for someone you know, or that you know of. Beyond that, they'd have to pay. Wouldn't you rather they pay with money, which is ultimately a measure of the world's respect?
I would both agree and disagree A simple counter example is, well, any number of business people who have made their money by robbing, stealing, or lobbying congress for anti-competitive practices aimed only at increasing their profits. I have no respect for them, and I doubt many people do, but they seem to be rich. I could see the argument that they are still implicitly respected by people continuing to purchase their products, but perhaps they have no choice.
Aside from the philosophical meaning of the resources that we'll be managing, there is a problem of granularity and perceived value. The Respect points themselves would be something that someone would not think twice about giving to someone else. If I like a person's blog post, I would be happy to throw some points their way, but I doubt I would want to pay them a bitcoin.
Now that I think about it, the value of a bitcoin might be a tad high.. If I could pay them a tiny fraction of a bitcoin, I probably would. The difference is that I would want it to
mean more more than the actual value of the bitcoin. It would be the monetary equivalent of me flicking a penny to a busker. And such an act, while it increases their monetary value, is considered offensive.
Perhaps what is needed is a micro-donation site which tracks the token appreciation of people, and those tokens of appreciation just happen to be backed by bitcoins.
