Yerameyahu wrote:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=your-reputation-will-be... This is still hard to wrap my head around every time I think about EP. :)

In the old days, we paid our internet per megabyte of traffic. Now most of us just play a flat fee for a certain bandwidth. In a rep economy, your participation in the economy is a flat fee for a certain bandwidth. You're subscribing to society-wide supply of services and goods. When you get paid, your bandwidth goes up. You get very little for services only valued by a single individual, but you get a lot for services or actions that are valued by many people, and these services could be as ephemeral as providing memetic content. You don't NEED to worry about monetizing as much as you do in a traditional economy (though to be fair, I don't consider rep in a rep economy to just be a popularity contest - rep is a more substantial currency than just "liking" a funny status update). If you think of the move from gold standard to a fiat currency, that must also have seemed strange. Why would anyone trade for money that had no real value? That was based not on gold, not on anything real, but only on the faith that someone else would be willing trade services or goods for the currency in the future. What if everyone suddenly decided they didn't want the currency? As it has turned out, fiat currencies work fine. People will work for money not backed by anything tangible. As long as everyone agrees on the system - ie. people with high rep get a higher "services bandwidth" from everyone else - and there's a mechanism for getting rep, I don't see why it shouldn't work (though it is a system that will probably need tighter monitoring to prevent people gaming the system or counterfeiting rep).