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Re: [ox-en] Contributions vs. money



Hi Christian and all!

Yesterday Christian Siefkes wrote:
Stefan Merten wrote:
In Christian's book contributions are just a sort of payment.
Otherwise I'd need nobody who accept them. I see absolutely no need in
making things more complicated without changing them really when
simple money will do as a contribution.

it's an error to think that any coupling between giving and getting in a
contribution-based system could be replaced by money.

That was only partly what I was talking about but I agree that money
can replace non-monetary contributions only in exchange systems based
on abstract labor. But your system is one of those.

For example, try to
redesing modern filesharing networks such as BitTorrent (which couple
uploading and downloading though some kind of "tit-for-tat" mechanism) by
using money as a measurement unit instead of the "natural" unit of such
contributions (bytes transferred). I challenge you to show that such a
money-based filesharing system (where people get money for uploading bytes
and spent money for downloading them) would still work in the same way as
the current ones;

It took me indeed a minute to solve that puzzle :-) . Here is my way
to the solution. First you have to think about what is really the
subject of the exchange. In this case it is bandwidth. You give
bandwidth to take bandwidth from others [1]_. Second you need to look
for a business model which deals with bandwidth. This is easy: Every
Internet provider. Or to get closer to the P2P systems: iTunes - which
at least some part of your contribution you pay for the bandwidth. And
I for one can say that this model works very well.

.. [1] In reality I doubt that it is really bandwidth which is
       exchanged. At least for those P2P systems which share illegally
       it is the risk which is shared. But that makes things not
       different but only more complicated.


						Grüße

						Stefan
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