Next think you know we'll have a currency exchange of karma points for dollars.

I'm ready to sell my account on ebay and donate the proceeds to charity. Apparently karma is very important to some people. I have realized it is just a measure of how much I post here.

I'm very curious what the karma->cash conversion rate is. The only reason I haven't put the auction up yet is I feel the rms username is damaged because of my disenfranchisement. If 30 days from the original incident pg won't restore my voting rights, I'll ebay my account anyways.

I can't comment on the HN part of your comment, but I like the way you think, rms. People who design interactive web experiences do so under a lot of assumptions. Seems like you are always asking about the edge cases where the assumptions fall flat. What if I want to game the system to get as much karma as possible? What if I want to sell my karma -- it was my time I spent on the site, why shouldn't I own that effort I put in. Would it be any different than sitting side-by-side with another user and telling them how to work the site?

I have a feeling it ticks people off, but I like the questions. I think awesome business opportunities are built around folks who ask the same kind of askew questions that others don't consider. It's the lackeys following the main path of least resistance that have a harder time.

Good luck with your trip through the wilderness.

> I think awesome business opportunities are built around folks who ask the same kind of askew questions that others don't consider.

I whole heartedly agree. I hope he gets his voting rights back. His comments are always insightful.

Who would you think would want it? It's kinda tainted goods, no?

On the other hand, if you can convince PG you sold it to someone else, he might restore your rights...

Or he might simply nuke the account entirely to put the kibosh on that kind of dealing...

The username itself is pretty generic. I figure some people would love to have the huge karma number, with or without voting rights.

I'd start the auction at $0.01, I'm quite confident it would get some bids, especially with the proceeds going to charity.

Plus, you get to pose as Stallman.

It would be funny if Stallman himself buys that account on eBay :-)

again, you can't do this. it wouldn't work because karma is infinite. the reason a Euro or USD has value is because there is a limited supply of them.

if you did fix an exchange rate of karma to USD or whatever currency, you and a friend could just upmod each other's comments to get free money.

I think the present limitation has more to do with the fact that karma is dolled out anonymously, which means there's no way to back up the legitimacy of your earnings from the status of your upvoters. It doesn't matter if karma is infinite, because there are a finite number of socially approved participants. This is why national currencies have value in the first place: because valuable organizations/individuals use them to transfer wealth. Money is just a communications medium, after all. One stuck in a pre-web mentality. Existing web currency manipulation systems are as primitive as a YouTube that only played TV in your web browser.

If you make karma transferable and allow negative values (thus creating debt and preventing runaway inflation), you could offer a genuine relativistic currency, in that individuals could back up the worth of their unit independently, without relying on trust in someone else (e.g. the state apparatus).

you don't fix the exchange rate, you let the market determine it. As the amount of karma increases it's possible for a value to decrease. But given how the dollar is doing, who knows what would happen.

here's a game theoretic explanation of why that's no good: okay, fine, let's have an exchange rate where karma gets less valuable as the amount of total karma increases.

then me and my friend will upmod each other 1 karma, because we're each gaining 1 whole karma, but the devaluation we're causing is only losing us a fraction of a karma. With these incentives, everyone will upmod ... and the value of a karma point will tend towards zero.

Karma is backed by gold didn't you know?

I'm inclined to agree.

Moreover, the US government basically prints money all the time... (in the metaphorical sense)

> (in the metaphorical sense)

Literal, as well. Paper money wears out and needs replacing.