[BugsJustFindMe]

I can't pay my rent or server bills in "bitcoins". I need to leverage my bitcoins in some way to get "dollars" that I can then pay my bills with. Non-monetary payment is still payment. Rare pokémon cards are payment too.

Also, in fact, people get things that otherwise cost money all the time based on prestige.

[Arainach]

You absolutely can, because you can sell the bitcoins and turn them directly into money in your savings account. There are exchanges that declare their exact value. You can't do that with prestige. There's no exchange and no market.

Crucially, money, bitcoin, and pokemon cards are all transferrable. You can't transfer prestige to someone else, so it has no value in financial transactions.

[BugsJustFindMe]

Transference doesn't matter, because exchange is not a requirement for gain. People get things merely from having prestige/influence/power all the time. It's sometimes called an award, and sometimes called tribute, and sometimes called currying favor.

> you can sell the bitcoins

Prestige is influence, and you can absolutely sell the use or effects of influence.

> There are exchanges that declare their exact value.

Payment does not need to have exact value, just non-zero expected value, which prestige definitely has. There is no exact value to startup equity either, but it's still rightly considered to be compensation for investment of labor and money.

[Arainach]

It's been known in creative fields - including software - forever that payment in "influence" is worthless.

It's been a meme for decades.

http://www.fyoupay.me/

[BugsJustFindMe]

You're thinking of exposure, not influence. And the payment is what an individual agrees to. If you don't agree to doing work to gain influence, that's up to you, just like I don't agree to doing work for bitcoins or Pokémon cards.