Absurdly enough, I had a dream about this last night. I was worrying about assessment of reputation and I realised how it had to work. The particular problem was the well-known one in evolutionary biology: how does a female choose which male to allow to beget, and which to allow to father, her children. Stuff about seahorses and anisogamous monoecious reproduction (except in my dream I couldn't remember the word "monoecious")
Strange to say, after I woke up, I couldn't remember the answer :-) How unusual. All I am left with is the trite insight that in human beings (and I suspect any species with a decent memory in which males play, or can play, a significant part in rearing offspring) assessment of reputation is, if not hard-wired, pretty much universal. And the only way it /can/ work is by assuming that he who can be trusted in small things can be trusted in great. You tend to believe that someone who lies and cheats about little things can't be trusted with big things. So the most successful liar is someone who remains scrupulously honest until the moment comes for lying. (So maybe you should never marry anyone you haven't often played cards with!) Not exactly ground-breaking. Ken Tim May wrote: > > On Wednesday, January 23, 2002, at 08:36 AM, Michael Motyka wrote: [...] > > Forgetting for the moment the nature of the goods or services that are > > exchanged couldn't the cash transfer be broken into many very small > > transfers with acknowledgment on each? First there must be some sort of > > agreement to pay. If the payment transactions halt when there is a > > dispute there are three classes of money : paid, unpaid and disputed. At > > least this leaves a smaller amount to be disputed. > > > > The general rule of thumb is: > > When the payoff for defection (fraud, failure to pay) is greater than > the likely/expected future revenue stream from honorable behavior, > defection is more likely. [...] > Remember that international trade has gone on for centuries, even > millennia, with various "transaction failures" being possible: a ship > sails into a port carrying goods and the local satrap decides to simply > seize the cargo rather than offer goods in return, a payment is made in > gold that turns out to be painted lead bricks, and so on. Likewise, > black market or ostensibly illegal transactions have been happening. > Examples abound. Lots of transaction failures are possible. An important point lots of people forget. The systems don't have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough. Another reason for quantum transactions, it limits the loss. (well, it is the same reason of course, but looked at a different way) One of the reasons I don't mind carrying 20 pound notes but I dislike 50 pound notes (& if there was such a thing as a 500 pound note I wouldn't ever use one) is that, although I don't like losing 20 pounds, it isn't going to cause me much real grief. 500 pounds would be a bit of a blow. > In these examples, there is little recourse to "courts." Of course, both > examples are good examples of anarchies. (A point well-made by David > Friedman over the years and by Bruce Benson in his exhaustive treatment > of the Law Merchant, the anarcho-capitalistic system used by traders > from various parts of the world to deal with each other in the absence > of top-down authoritarian law.) > > The mistake so many critics/observers of digital cash (cryptographers > especially) make is to expect digital cash to solve problems rigorously > that are not rigorously solved when the forms of payment are chests of > gold, IOUs, shipments of grain, or even Federal Reserve Notes. Or to > solve the fraud problem that banks could easily pull off if they wished > to (but don't). The protocol for digital cash must be seen as just one > part of the larger ecology of economic transactions between actors with > varying world models (beliefs in what other actors will likely do). [...]
