Todd Boyle wrote: > >It seems to turn on what the definition of > >an intermediary is. Is it the case that > >he is defining it widely and you are defining > >it narrowly? > > Fair enough. But the reputation passage begins with the > following, which I think, is fairly unambiguous. > > "Reputation relies on intermediaries to convey information. > For example, credit rating agencies are used to minimize > adverse selection (hidden knowledge) problems in credit. " > > Grrr... I absolutely HATE the credit agencies' monopoly!
Right, but your hatred should not interfere with your analysis of the point :-) > They impose self-serving rules, collect excess rents, and > are as obsolete as banks. Or not! > To Szabo the endpoint of analysis, is that credit reporting > agencies are necessary? Well, I think you need to be more general. What he is (probably) saying is that some specialised business that concentrates on efficient distribution of reputation is necessary. The alternate is inefficiency. All the credit reference bureau is, is an efficient way to get at someone's credit history. The reputation bureau is an efficient way to get at someone's reputation. Google, for example, can be used for reputation. But, it's not efficient, because it is not presenting the deeper analysis needed to make it precisely tuned for reputation. What he's saying (I guess - I haven't read it) is that the end result of the market process is that efficient providers of reputation will arise on the net. > This conclusion must be a result of assumptions about the > goals of reputation, the purpose of money, and the constraints > within which money exchanges arise (e.g. the legal domain, > finality of settlement, blocking of historical spending trail, > identity, and other facts by a statist banking model.) > > I regard credit agencies and the whole sorry mess, not > as the endpoint of analysis but beginning point of a new > inquiry, to find another alternative. Well, they are the endpoint in their world. Consider their assumptions: manual processing, credit, poor communications. Consider the net: automated processing, great comms, and hopefully assets will rule. Different assumptions will lead to a new story; but it may be that the end result bears analogue. (Consider that paper I recently circulated for review describing the net FS; one of the observations is that it looks strikingly similar, in the large, to the old FS.) > You know, in all his writings I never found anything suggesting > an awareness that a lifetime of provably good activities, by a > real person, in a long term web of business and societal > ties, family, etc. with fixed addresses, might be highly > correlated with not having screwed anyone, i.e. there may > be little need for systems of negative reputation. We know > that real transactions can be provably stored, with digital > signatures of counterparties, thus requiring no further > cooperation from anybody at all. > > This is called, owning your own reputation. Huh. Well, maybe he left that there for someone else to write :-) -- iang
