[TophWells]

I'm rather disappointed that in spite of promises that transactions can be non-zero sum, on close inspection these transactions just draw money from other accounts - usually TUA. From the description, I expected new Strangecoins to be created out of thin air by transactions, and I wanted to see where you were going with that design.

If money's still just flowing from accounts into other accounts, then it's something that would be doable with dollars or Bitcoins if the people involved signed appropriate contracts. Some of your proposed transactions have real-world equivalents; "coupling" sounds like creating a joint account for a married couple. Others, like "inhibition", I don't understand their motivation.

What's Strangecoin for, exactly? Are you supposed to be buying goods and services with it? Why have features like continuous-time transactions or free money for all, what benefit is gained from them?

[djestrada]

Other comments suggest that this can be implemented with existing tools, which I take as a virtue of the proposal.

In any case, John von Neumann proved a long time ago that any nonzero sum game with n players can be modeled as a zero sum game with n+1 players, where the n+1 player represents the global state. TUA is simply an implementation of this proof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Extensions

I tried to explain inhibition in another comment in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496858

I give an an analogy in the proposal of the popularity of a celebrity couple being a nonlinear relationship to the popularity of each celebrity individually. I think our intuitive understanding of our social relationships is nonlinear in this way generally, and I think Strangecoin can model those nonlinear relationships well.

So, for instance, I'm imagining a family, spouses, close friends, and so on entering into extended coupling transactions, so that as a community their prosperity rises and falls together. I might also enter into such transactions with certain business with whom I want to couple my activities, and these coupling transactions might serve in lieu of direct billing or payment. A coupling relationship with a business is effectively a contract, but with traditional currency you need the whole legal framework of contracts to support the transaction, and with Strangecoin the transaction is built directly into the currency, and the interface looks almost exactly like a point-of-sale cash transaction.

And I can enter into less serious relationships of varying degrees with other parties. The effect is a way of managing not just financial transactions, but also reputation, investment, and other dynamics social constraints on the economy via the currency itself. Money is memory (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf), but our existing currencies only represent some aspects of our economic activity, and therefore put limits on the memory stored in the economy. A nonlinear coin like Strangecoin can embed that social knowledge in the currency itself, providing a more robust memory framework on which we can conduct our economic transactions.

I only hint at this in the proposal, but I suspect a system like this is required to resolve the twisted legal artifice the corporate veil, because it quantifies explicitly the role individuals have in collective economic activity, and thereby gives a method for explicitly holding persons proportionally responsible (in both credit and blame) for their contributions to that activity.

But I think that's a much more radical proposal than the one I've offered for Strangecoin, and I should probably only be defending that here. =)

[spaceapple]

I think you might ultimately have to explain and defend these ideas together. Bitcoin proved that a purely digital currency could have value alongside government-issued currencies.

To create a viable Strangecoin network, you'll need to demonstrate how a more cooperative economy can come into being and retain value within a more predatory, zero-sum society, where corrupting your network and exploiting it may yield rewards in US dollars.

[TophWells]

>In any case, John von Neumann proved a long time ago that any nonzero sum game with n players can be modeled as a zero sum game with n+1 players, where the n+1 player represents the global state. TUA is simply an implementation of this proof.

It's not quite the same, since TUA can be empty. Unless TUA's balance can be negative, or if it's infinite.