Ed Murphy wrote: >could go back to charging for proposing and/or voting;
Please don't, that really sucked. The current less direct system, of buying voting power which can be exercised on all (Ordinary) proposals, is vastly better. I think generally currency-based systems don't work well in a nomic. We have no scarce commodities, so no natural source of money. Currencies inevitably either suffer hyperinflation, because they're not scarce (which is what happened to the Mark), or an artificial scarcity is imposed and stifles the game (VTs, P-Notes). VCs and VLOP are working better than most currency systems. I suspect this is because of the restrictions on them that make them relatively difficult to transfer, though contracts could be used to circumvent that. Absent the contracts (which haven't occurred yet), they're more like scores than currency holdings. I still wouldn't be surprised to see them inflate, though. A large supply of VCs could easily be made available by submitting hundreds of CFJs to get the judicial salaries. (This was in fact done back in 1994, when judicial salaries were in Points, and is why no one ever references CFJs 163 to 662.) The things that are naturally scarce in this game are players' time, expertise, and creativity. These are not fungible, so we really can't base a currency on them. A gift economy is really the only model that fits the facts. -zefram
