Some more thoughts
Thanks for the feedback, Alberto. As always, it helps! So let’s go on with the discussion a bit:
- Time: Yes, you can hand out a voucher for now. Hacking the system like that is appreciated even :-) If you include a voucher for a specific product or service as "debt", then a train ticket is also debt. And the time between order and shipment of physical goods is also debt. Such debt is essential in trade. It does not create trust problems with the exchange mechanism itself (as debt does in time banks), since it is P2P debt: you know who owes you what, and you chose the seller in the first place based on your trust that he or she will deliver the promised product or service. P2P debt is also not transferable (so, tied to that personal trust relationship and context). While the collectivized debt has neither of these attributes (and creates the fuzzy free rider problem for time banking).
- Uncertainty: Again, the conditional voucher is a good idea to hack the system. Some other implementation of network barter may support uncertainty (like investments, with risk levels) explicitly. Economy App does not, since it's focused on mutual support through goods and services.
- Identity: Let me tie this to the discussion about the Commons, as you already started doing. Following the thoughts of Elinor Ostrom, a commons is a resource with flatrate access to insiders, who are expected to use it responsibly, but also has or should have clear boundaries regarding who is an outsider without access. This can indeed scale up to manage large amounts of resources, like community-managed forests. However, the subtitling exercise has no "boundaries of the commons": no flatrate access rights to unMonastery resources, or sense of ownership, can be derived from taking part. Instead, it was a fun exercise for everyone involved (including myself). That's fine, it just does not scale: everyone of us has only so much resources to invest for fun. This makes us come back to the problem you realized at the beginning of this discussion: if we want to facilitate the tenfold or hundredfold amount of Edgeryders' collaboration, we are in need of a compensation scheme. The Commons idea seems of limited use to me, as it only regulates how people contribute to their own commons, not to projects of other Edgeryders. The Harmonious Hackathon approach is ingenious in its own way, as it is a rare direct barter opportunity adapt for inter-project collaboration. But it does not apply to all tasks and contexts (not to a quick need for subtitling for example): it's useful, but not for all our needs. Indirect barter (like in Economy App) is useful for all kinds of stuff though.
Now many (me included) intuitively do not like the idea of putting price tags on everything when bartering … it’s sounds like the beginning of objectification of all and everything, and like a way in again for interest rates, debt-backed securities etc. again. The alternative would be indirect barter without price tags. It has been tried (like on BarterQuest or NetCycler), but in my view nobody got it to work yet: there, transactions require a lot of manual coordination effort and are easily frustrated by one veto in a potential ring barter, so they are way too rare for a well-working economic exchange mechanism. For this reason, we looked for ways to search and close indirect barter deals automatically, and the only solution we have so far includes price tags on offers. That’s the tradeoff we made to enable collaboration not just in relatively close, trusting communities like Edgeryders, but also between near-strangers. Which seems like a prerequisite for generally applicable economic exchange mechanims.
Indeed, as you noted, it is not clear who is indebted to whom in the subtitling example. That would only become clear when the transaction logic of barter is applied to everything, including a membership fee to be paid in barter for sustaining the Edgeryders operations like LOTEs and website. I’m pretty sure we do not want transaction logic to penetrate all that. But barter is also open to gift culture: instead of membership fees, Edgeryders could support its platform by donating small amounts of barter value to it (hacking Economy App for it: Edgeryders offers “digital thank-yous” with a price tag, donors just order that product). Network barter would now map these donations as income of the Edgeryders platform user to its expenses for sustaining Edgeryders, like paying a community manager in barter value. So in contrast to now, large chunks of work would not need to be volunteer efforts but would be compensated from everyone’s small donations. Distributing the load like this is a benefit of the transaction logic … a benefit you get for accepting price tags 