The YKarma experiment

Blockchains are boring now. It’s been ten years since Bitcoin launched, and cryptocurrencies have almost exclusively been used to recapitulate existing monetary systems in slightly new forms. This is boring. Programmable currencies give us the ability to build whole newcategoriesof economies, ones which reject all traditional assumptions about how value is generated, transferred, or stored. It’s past time to start experimenting with such systems.

Putting my reputation where my mouth is, your (not-so-)humble correspondent has done just that. Specifically, I have created, and open-sourced, an experimental, blockchain-based, non-monetary economy, one which quantifies reputation as a spendable currency within a gift economy.

I’m not doing this in the hopes it will take over the world. I’m doing this in the hopes it will be one of many experimental blockchain-based economies that reject the tenets of traditional monetary capitalism, some of which might actually take root.

Not that I’m opposed to capitalism. (A surprisingly controversial stance, in the Bay Area where I live.) It’s great up to a point. But there’s no reason to think that it’s the final system forever, the end of all economic history, until the heat