From: Joel Pitt (joel.pitt@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 07 2007 - 17:24:50 MST
On 1/8/07, Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Philip Goetz wrote:
> > 3. Information: Bits of unknown information. This may be the main
> > trading item of interest. However, what conveys information to one
> > person may already be known by another. To use information as
> > currency, you might have to create an exchange process, in which the
> > giver doles out bits one at a time, and the receiver continually
> > predicts the next bit. The number of bits deemed to have been given,
> > to measure the exchange, would be taken as the total number of bits
> > transferred, minus the number of bits the receiver predicted correctly
> > (or possibly some more correct measure). The receiver could waive
> > this process if it admits it doesn't have the information (say, a song
> > it hasn't heard). A seller could require such a waiver as a condition
> > of a sale. A difficulty is that the theoretical translation into
> > energy is, and may continue to be, orders of magnitude apart from the
> > practical translation into energy.
> > 8. Goulash currency. A combination of all of the above, in which you
> > might set your preferences about which currencies to be buying and
> > selling in every exchange, and software agents working on behalf of
> > the buyer and seller would work out what was actually exchanged in
> > every transaction. I'd lay my bets on this one.
> >
> This makes the most sense. It's the currency that I'd use if I could,
> and had the attention to spare for the requisite valuations.
> N.B.: This currency will inherently cause different entities to value
> different things differently. Well, of course that just makes it more
> reflective of reality...
One interesting side effect is that music lovers will probably value
musical information higher, but will likely be better at predicting
the next bit of information in a song. Thus the amount of new
information in an unheard song will be less for someone with a more
developed musical modality.
Generalising this beyond music, information buyers who are familiar
with a given type of information will be able to buy it cheaper then
buying information from a completely unknown domain. Ironically, a
true random number generator would be the most profitable information
source.
If this was a form of currency, or even a way of overseeing the
transfer and purchase of information, then I envision a demand for
prediction tools in different knowledge domains. These tools would
save a consumer "money" by increasing the customers apparent domain
knowledge.
-- -Joel "Unless you try to do something beyond what you have mastered, you will never grow." -C.R. Lawton
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