Re: PaySwarm-powered Open Source Crowdfunding Platform

The only problem is that it's vague language, but I think I know what
you mean...


- Credits are a "quantitative token of gratitude."
   What's gratitude, and what does it mean for X to be a token of Y? I
don't think you can answer that. But let me have a go at it.

   I think the point is that the tokens are meant be meaningful in one
domain, but _explicitly meaningless_ in some other domain. The tokens
should disclaim any legal liability on the part of the issuer to
provide any service or compensation whatsoever. It's like the opposite
of a contract - a contract brings a relationship of some kind _into_
the legal domain, but a "gratitude token" keeps the relationship _out
of_ the legal domain.


- "It then decides to hand out those donations in relation to the
credits people have earnt."

Is this at odds with the first statement? I'm worried that any
corporate entity that does this would be in trouble (but IANAL). If
Company A issues these meaningless tokens, and then every month sends
out a $10 to each token holder, would the company develop a liability
to continue doing so because of common expectations? 'My words say one
thing, but my actions say another.'

But let's suppose that the presentation of the tokens is successful
and the issuer is not legally liable for anything. My definition for
"token" is about a mechanism, the functionality of the token. Tokens
can be transferred, possessed, presented, but not
forged/counterfeited. Tokens can be traded or exchanged on markets
like eBay and craigslist.

Let's assume that there's a stable price (in USD) for a project's
tokens. Now the tokens can be purchased by the public, but they're not
securities since they're meaningless. The project could issue more of
these and sell them to earn money (it wouldn't be a loan, since they
wouldn't need to write it down as a liability in their books, nor
would it be an investment since it wouldn't imply any ownership). So
the effect of this is that there may be a difference between the
"legal value" of the tokens and some other value, which we may call
its social value.


I think this is what you mean - please tell me if I'm off-base?
Gratitude tokens resemble financial instruments, except they're not.
The point is to conduct economic activity (not commerce, but
"organized gifting" or something), including modern technology like
quantitative bookkeeping and secure tokens, yet outside the realm of
commercial law and commercial finance.



On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> At no point are the credits anything more than a quantitative token of
> gratitude from the project.


--
Andrew Miller

Received on Wednesday, 2 January 2013 19:30:02 UTC