new member introduction

[Eric Brigham]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is proper etiquette, but I wanted to introduce myself to anyone still actively involved in this group.  My name is Eric Brigham.  I am finishing up my MBA at the University of Colorado.  In my spare time I have been studying all kinds of alternative economics.  In particular, however, I am finding that an open source, decentralized, transparent, self regulating transaction system really interests me.  I'm actually considering pursuing a PhD (if it's even possible) studying the ideas of social money and alternative value transaction systems.  Since the concept of Ripple seems to fall nicely into these categories, I'm wondering if anyone in this group is currently in academia studying such things?  If so please let me know.  I would really like to chat.

That being said, I'm also an entrepreneur. My background thus far in business has been in software and engineering.  I see a lot of potential in a concept like Ripple, however the MBA in me knows that we should be smart with how we take something like this to market.  One slip up in the design (such that it attacts fraudsters or other negative press/image) could taint peoples perspective for ever.  On the other hand, I think that now, more than ever before in history, does mankind have the technology, tools, and willingness to properly return the act of money creation to those who actually add true value to society.  And that's what gets me excited.

With regard to the Ripple project itself, I actually think that the cleanest solution would be to create a global product (ie: a new product offering for banks) that can be customized and championed at the local level.  Doing so opens up possibilities for businesses and consumers to monetize their social relationships (ie: twitter, fb, etc) from the bottom up, rather than the top down.  As we all know however, there are a lot of design kinks to be worked out for any mass implementation of a ripplesq system.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys and getting involved.  Sorry for the long email.

Cheers.

--Eric

[Miles Thompson]

Hey Eric,

Good to hear your introduction.

I totally agree and I like the way you put it , that "now, more than ever before in history, does mankind have the technology, tools, and willingness to properly return the act of money creation to those who actually add true value to society"

Actually I hope you don't mind, I just borrowed this and changed the first aim on my manifesto page for tradeify..

from..
" We aim to take back control of our own credit, and enable even the less fortunate in our society to control and benefit from at least the credit for which they provide the real backing. "

to..
" We aim to take back control of our own credit, and return the act of money creation to those who actually add true value to society. "

;-) I think you put it nicely. On this subject I'm really excited by the idea that *one day* all this might result in the delivery of a *robust* currency system that can work on a (relatively old fashioned) sms/txt phone in an african village somewhere and enable them to create (genuine/trustworth) credit amongst themselves and thus help them build their own way out of poverty. Control over credit really is a form of power that can be used to further impoverish the already poor. (cf the origin of the word 'the man')

Anyway like you I'm interested in this area as both an entrepreneur but also contemplating a masters in alternative currency / ripple type systems next year. There is a fellow in computer science/math department at the University here (who I won't mention by name) who may be interested in sponsoring this. it would be interesting if you ended up studying this, as well, perhaps we can swap notes or help each other get up to speed or something.

I think there is a lot of interesting research, especially in analyzing p2p networking and incentives and tit-for-tat sharing and such things over networks that might well be of great interest. A lot of this is based on research on theoretical/simulated networks but another really important thing, I think, would be to increase the transparency of our transactions - if we can get transactions into the open and out from behind the firewalls of banks and such then we will have something to actually dig into and start doing real analysis on how to improve robustness/efficiency/default-tolerance of transactions systems as deployed in the real world.  There is already a fair bit of alternative currency trade (of various kinds) taking place but very little in the way of open data available for analysis so far which is a bit of a shame I think.

Some favorite academic papers, currently at or near the top of my reading list include:

---


Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent? [ pdf ]
Michael Piatek, Tomas Isdal, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkataramani
4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI 2007).

---

SumUp: Sybil-Resilient Online Content Voting
http://www.news.cs.nyu.edu/SumUp/
Overview Online voting system likes Diggs, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, ets are known to be susceptible to Sybil attack in which the attacker creates many accounts to cast bogus votes for an object. SumUp leverages social network underline the accounts to defend against such attack. By using a novel capacity assignment on the social links and collecting votes in an approximate max-flow fashion, SumUp can successfully limits the number of bogus votes casted by the attacker to the number of attack edges (e_A) with high probability. SumUp also leverage users' feedback to further reduce the number of bogus votes casted by the attacker if the attacker keeps doing that for different objects. Using SumUp on Digg voting trace, we found evidences of Sybil attacks in real world.

---

On Money as a Medium of Exchange
            Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
            Journal of Political Economy 1989 vol., 97, No. 4

We analyze economies in which individuals specialize in consumption and production and meet randomly over time in a way that implies that trade must be bilateral and quid pro quo. Nash equilibria in trading strategies are characterized. Certain goods emerge endogenously as media of exchange, or commodity money, depending both on their intrinsic properties and extrinsic beliefs. There are also equilibria with genuine fiat currency circulating as the general medium of exchange. We find that equilibria are not generally Pareto optimal and that introducing fiat currency into a commodity money economy may unambiguously improve welfare.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1832197

---

Be glad to hear of more of what you get up to Eric.

Thanks

Miles Thompson
http://blog.tradeify.org

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ripple users" group.
To post to this group, send email to rippl...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rippleusers...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers?hl=en.

--
miles
http://google.com/profiles/utunga

[Eric Brigham]

Miles -

Thanks or the quick reply (and the shout-out in your manifesto).  I'll definitely give your recommendations a read through.  Judging from Tradify, you're in NZ? It's funny, I was originally attending grad school in Auckland back in 2007.  Great country.

Are there any other groups that you find more active than others in this realm of alternative exchange?

--Eric

[Miles Thompson]

Yup, in New Zealand.

I try to give shout outs to the most inspiring/active people in the blog roll down the right hand side of my blog but perhaps worth mentioning that, apart from ripple..

Pelle Braendgaard is doing some really interesting things, and posts regularly on the agile-banking list:
http://groups.google.com/group/agile-banking/browse_thread/thread/3ff40f71fffa965

The metacurrency project is also quite active in the current time frame
http://www.metacurrency.org/content/events  though I have not followed up with them too much and tend to find their stuff to be a little too abstract.

And of course, as you probably know CES  http://www.ces.org.za/ is the grand-daddy of LETS systems online and is being actively used by almost all local LETS systems *but that is not ripple!

There is bartercard, timebanking in japan, swedish JAK banking, Thomas Greco, Digitalcoin.info, 'ven', huge activity in 'virtual currency' for MMORPGs and facebook etc.. eg  (http://bit.ly/7pLO3O) and of course the recent ycombinator startup http://listia.com .. but well I'll just list the above three as the main areas of interest that are perhaps most closely related to this list.

Miles

[Annette Loudon]

Hi Eric and Miles,

I've been casually reading up on alternative currencies. Was thinking about making a research project out of it, but will probably continue to study casually for now. And I have a friend that's about to start postgrad studies in new economics, his background is in systems theory, so he might be interested in swapping notes as well.

Having helped to run and grow the LETS community in Sydney I've started to get a good practical feel for some of the real world issues. I think something like Ripple could solve some of the problems. The LETS system gives a lot of control to the traders, but central policies are still required, and these vary from system to system, making to messy to trade between systems. Eg: In Sydney we trade services at 20 Operas an hour. It's a wacky concept, but the premise is that everyone's time is valuable. We like the feel of it, but when we go to trade with other systems we are the cheap labour, and their goods and services are expensive for us.

The idea of decentralising and allowing users to set their own limits with one another is very exciting.

Miles, your project looks really interesting. I'll keep my eye on that.

Eric, I'm not sure what CES policy is on their data, but Tim Jenkins is really friendly. If their policy allows it I'm sure they'd be happy to share some of their data for analysis.


Annette