From: Paul Hughes (paul@planetp.cc)
Date: Fri Mar 10 2000 - 01:33:51 MST
Billy Brown wrote:
> In essence, in order to compete with Ebay and the like you need some
> advantage for the customer that offsets the extra trouble of dealing in BUs
> instead of his native currency. There isn't an obvious one, which is
> probably why no one is doing it. If you can find a non-obvious advantage,
> then you may have something.
IMHO it all boils down to this question:
Is it possible to design a non-linear software program complex enough to match
buyers and sellers so efficiently that currency, virtual or otherwise, is never
needed?
Here's a better example of what I'm getting at:
Lets say you want to sell your VW. Finally a guy contacts you who has 20
bushels of wheat. You don't need the wheat, but you know a guy in Texas who
does, and he happens to have a new software program that another contact of
yours wants. This contact happens to have 100 shares of a hot new start-up that
you're dying to get, and she's itching to sell. So you take the wheat, give it
to that guy in Texas who exchanges it for that software program who you then
give to your other contact in exchange for her 100 shares of IPO, inc. In the
end you traded your VW for 100 shares of IPO, inc. Everyone gets what they want
and *no currency* is ever used.
Is it possible, with the Internet's 100 million+ users, to create a system to
manage all of this stuff automatically? A global bartering system so complex
that it manages to keep track of the immense brain-like structure of buyers and
sellers? A system that would seem to render currency superfluous? If I'm not
mistake supply-chain management software is doing this to some degree for B2B
operations. And didn't I just hear that Ford and Daimer-Chrysler are setting up
something like this with all of their sub-contractors?
Assuming such a system could be designed, could it not escape the tax system
entirely? After all when was the first time you paid taxes on an item at a
garage sale? Except in this case its a global garage sale of new and used items
facilitated by the Internet.
Paul Hughes
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