[fromdoon]

I have always wondered that why we cannot make intangibles like happiness, emotions as a currency. Even though they are more often than not treated as the real wealth a person can have, we have never ever been able to count these intangibles and store them.

Of course this seems to be an absurd idea at first. But, lets try to think about it, doesn't matter how ridiculous or implausible this might sound.

My mind goes back to the movie "In Time", where time was treated as currency, something on which your life depended, literally.

Can't the smartest people on this planet, think of some thing absolutely fascinating, that may let us, mortal people gather our happiness and maybe able to trade it.

Consider for example that someone who helps people out, people who may not have enough money, but who have the intention to bless that person. Can't that person count/take the blessings and become rich in process.

If this is possible, their might a big motivation for everyone to do good, help people out, get their genuine blessings ...

I know this all sounds really crazy!! Just wanted to dish my thoughts out :)

[ttctciyf]

I think we need a thin client on your Google Glass that feeds your personal interactions continuously to an AI engine in the cloud.

Having established that you were the recipient of a well-merited compliment that significantly pleased you, the identity of the complimenter, and the fact that your benefactor is HappyCoin(tm)-enabled, the engine would automatically calculate the exact monetary value of your happiness and create a microtransaction as payment, which you would then hopefully approve while still uplifted.

[waterlesscloud]

There's a Bruce Sterling story, "Maneki Neko", that's always fascinated me as model for a potential future. In it, a master computer tells people to perform certain actions it knows will fulfill other people's needs. The more you put in, the more you're eligible to get out. It is, in essence, a gift economy organized by the cloud.

It's the sort of idea that seems tantalizingly plausible with smartphones and the cloud, but is hard to actually put into practice. It's definitely the kind of thing that could drive a host of startup ideas, though.

Here's the full story online: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/

[zevyoura]

You might be interested in Bhutan's use of "gross national happiness" as a metric[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness

[streptomycin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie