The Democractic Manifesto

[madd0ct0r]

Kane, your method only works when you are the only speculator / data capitalist in the system.

If you advertise your service of "100MB data you want, sent from me to you, in return for 500MB of anything, sent via the torrent" you'll get undercut very very quickly by somebody who wants (or needs) to improve their ratio more then you do.

Given the number of people on torrents, and that most of them would view speculation as a waste of their time (not generating high enough returns for time invested compared to normal behavior) I'd fully expect your plan to fall flat.

There is something similar used on some maker forums - rep. You like somebodies post, you give them a rep bonus. The value of your bonus is tied to how much rep you have. You cannot give the same person rep for frequently then about 1 in 5.
Still possible to abuse, but it works reasonably well for highlighting the biggest contributors. Where is does fall flat is if somebody has generated all of is rep on photoshop tutorials, and then gives advice in the welders forum, I might be more inclined to believe him then an actual newbie welder.
But the same happens where somebody inherits his money and we all listen to his business advice.
Or he makes it on the stock market and we ask for advice on buying houses ect.

[Kane Starkiller]

So why does the oh so dangerous ratio speculation not occur in real life? There's lots of people with bad ratios. Lots of people with good ratios. The latter don't speculate, don't save, don't "burn DVDs" for those with bad ratios for money. Nobody just does this sort of crap.

What are you talking about? This is a purely theoretical discussion: whether seed-to-leech ratio can behave exactly like money. They can. In practice obviously it doesn't happen because we do have real money and use real money to pay for internet and files.
How exactly did you think you can just jump from purely theoretical discussion about the nature of the ratios to somehow ask why it doesn't happen in practice?

Theoretically, I can sell even air. Practically, that was only feasible in deeply polluted Tokyo of the 1970s.

But that what this discussion was: a theoretical excercize as a response to your claim that seed-to-leech ratios cannot be made to behave like money. I showed that indeed they can and quite easily. Since seed-to-leech rations aren't used as a practical means of measuring value even on the internet your counterpoint that no one is using it online doesn't make sense.

Kane, your method only works when you are the only speculator / data capitalist in the system.

If you advertise your service of "100MB data you want, sent from me to you, in return for 500MB of anything, sent via the torrent" you'll get undercut very very quickly by somebody who wants (or needs) to improve their ratio more then you do.

In other words just like in real life with real money: competition drives prices down. This doesn't address my initial point that Stas Bush's claim that ratios cannot be used as money is wrong.

There is something similar used on some maker forums - rep. You like somebodies post, you give them a rep bonus. The value of your bonus is tied to how much rep you have. You cannot give the same person rep for frequently then about 1 in 5.
Still possible to abuse, but it works reasonably well for highlighting the biggest contributors. Where is does fall flat is if somebody has generated all of is rep on photoshop tutorials, and then gives advice in the welders forum, I might be more inclined to believe him then an actual newbie welder.
But the same happens where somebody inherits his money and we all listen to his business advice.
Or he makes it on the stock market and we ask for advice on buying houses ect.

If they "like" my post? What exactly does that mean? What's to stop them from disliking my post even if they secretly like it? Is it up to their good will how much "likes" they'll give me or is there a fixed rate? I don't see how such a system can be remotely made to work in real life where "likes" would determine how much bread you can buy or how much gasoline you can buy.

[K. A. Pital]

What are you talking about? This is a purely theoretical discussion

Any theory which concerns the real world must be verifiable and falsifiable. Your statements fail to account for the fact that in reality, using non-monetary concepts in place of money does not work well. Using, say, grain as money is also possible, and yet people simply turn to barter when the monetary system collapses.

In practice obviously it doesn't happen because we do have real money and use real money to pay for internet and files.

If we had centrally provided free internet access, trading outside the network would be extremely impractical and stupid. Inside the network you could very much do whatever you want, but if the information exchange does not allow a monetary transaction, what are you going to pay your benefactor with in return for him downloading something for you? Send him goods directly via the post? That's just fucking stupid, hard to accomplish and in any case would just be a recidive of barter trade which you can't prevent anyway, regardless of whether you have a non-monetary system or not.

Since seed-to-leech rations aren't used as a practical means of measuring value even on the internet your counterpoint that no one is using it online doesn't make sense.

Seed-to-leech ratios are not used to measure "value". They're used to measure human activity. That's all.

I don't see how such a system can be remotely made to work in real life where "likes" would determine how much bread you can buy or how much gasoline you can buy.

You don't "buy" gasoline or bread. You just get them from the system. Your status cannot be transferred to another person, and sending around gasoline or bread, which are easily and quickly consumed, but hard to properly store for an individual, would be stupid.

So you want to use your ratio to speculate on bread? You'd have to create a bread storage facility and confine your speculations to one or two days, because the bread goes bad afterwards. Besides, if ratios are just indicative for planners on who is more active and who is less active, and the system supplies people according to the ratios, but explicitly forbids speculation (say, with a risk of ratio nullification if one is found speculating and abusing the "supply net"), speculation becomes inconvenient, dangerous and, well... stupid.

Most consumer goods like food, beverage, etc. would be firmly outside the realm of speculation or the scale of speculation would be very small, since they quickly go bad, require special facilities for any sort of prolonged storage and in general would be produced in huge enough a quantity that their scarcity would be low.

Like I said, ratios are much harder to use as money than classical money. They lack transferrability, savings is complicated, as is exchange. How are you going to "pay" for hungreds of post shipments to people with a bad ratio? The ratio is known inside the system and provides you with access to certain goods, a certain level of supply, etc. For example, your ratio and your occupation in the system might grant you a right to free railway travel. How are you going to "sell" it, save it or speculate on it? Highly unlikely.

Same goes for entertainment of any kind. Food loses value once eaten, films lose value after being watched, books lose value after being read (not to zero, they have a repeat view value, but it is much, much smaller).

Why don't people with a poor torrent rating ask people with a high rating to download stuff for them and then ship it to them? That's the relevant question. If ratios were as good as money at exchange, savings and investment, people would be relying on them in this fashion already, since (a) the disparity you mentioned is there (b) top seeders have interesting content to offer (c) leechers can exhaust their resource. Why don't they do it? It is even easier now, because real money is there and the bad leecher can easily pay the top seeder via paypal for the download. In a world without money that'd be much harder.

So explain to me how now, with the presence of real money and all the problems you cited, the seeder-leecher ratio is not taking on any exchange roles. It definetely should, since people do have a desire for interesting files which top seeders can download for them, and yet it does not happen.