Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

What is the motivation for this?

The big advantage of money is as a communication mechanism: An increase of demand of pencils, though price chnges, can increase the demand for burgers in a town where the wood for said pencils is made, even though the purchasers have absolutely no idea, and no control, over the results of their actions.

Sending positive and negative feedback to transactions has the opposite effect: It avoids the information hiding that is the key to making the economy tractable, and makes what are simple decisions much more complicated, but I suddenly have to care about what people think about the suppliers of my suppliers.

I suspect a economy running on this strangecoin would be less effective than one running on a regular currency, just like it's much harder to be gay in a tiny homophobic town than in a large, relatively anonymous big city.

Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm

> I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out. 

author: don't use a url shortener or HN will kill your post. For those who don't have showdead turned on, here was his response:

From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm

> I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out. 

Traditional money makes certain features of the economic system tractable, but it masks other important relationships that constraint its behavior. The question isn't whether or not the the transactions should be shaped by feedback from the network; the question instead is which features of the economic network do we want to make salient to agents in that network.

You might think of Strangecoin as a way of making features of the interdependence of economic relationships salient in each transaction. In the parlance of STDs, I'm not just trading with you, I'm trading with everyone else you are trading with.

I'm not sure I understand your analogy to small homophobic towns, but I suppose you mean that people with less economic support will have less representation in Strangecoin. It's true that Strangecoin will be disposed to preferential attachment, but I'm not sure any economic system wouldn't. It's a feature of the system that it makes these attachment relations explicit, a feature of the existing economy that is completely masked over with traditional money.

I think Strangecoin is super interesting. I think his analogy was that with a coin where relationships matter, you have to care how a person is connected, when you deal with them. I think it could be a feature, not a bug, even if it makes things less efficient.