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Main article: Economic Systems
Since users of the system will be doing alot of work, work that would be typically paid in the “real” world, a community might contemplate paying them for their services. A community will need to aggregate opinion for policy-making (beyond the algorithmic), hold votes on issues, enforce bylaws, report on news, etc. Plenty of administrative effort will likely be needed over time to handle these tasks, even though the community will probably start as an exclusively voluntary effort. It is not unreasonable to see that full-time staff would eventually be required as the community grows in numbers and complexity. The wages of such employees would, of course, be determined in the same way that all policies are. The effectiveness of employees could be judged by the people in the community using the tools provided by the ratings system itself. And pay could be made transparent so those attaining higher management positions would have strong resistance to paying themselves disproportionately. We might contemplate the creation of a cryptocurrency for this purpose, one that can be used interchangeably across the whole ratings system. As a side note, doing so might increase the mainstream use of crypto as a currency for daily trade.
It is inevitable that a ratings system with crypto will seek to pay its members on the basis of ratings in general, not just those pertaining to work. After all, people who are highly rated are probably also the ones most valuable to society. People who lie to us, answer in bad faith, are manipulative, etc. are a net drain on us regardless of their expertise in their work area. So it makes sense to do this.
We can think of this as a type of UBI that you simply receive if you score high enough in the ratings. Traditional economists may critique this as creating money for situations where no transaction took place but by incentivizing good behavior we improve everyone’s economic outlook. We might note, further, that alot of non-monetary labor is performed all the time including volunteer work, helping a friend, parenting, etc. We might argue that this is done within some nuanced system of informal ratings. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to formalize the ratings and attach some form of monetary reward to it.
This system could also be used to supplement the pay of “real world” laborers who are generally viewed as underpaid. Rather than rectifying the power structures needed to pay them reasonably (eg laws, labor unions), a ratings system could offer them a supplement based on the rated value of their labor and each individual’s rating. Our system, in this capacity, begins to displace traditional economic systems.
Once we introduce a cryptocurrency (or even without it) we must raise the problem of paid fake ratings. One supposes that a crypto-enabled payment system could be built with a high level of transparency in order to better detect malfeasance of this type. This wouldn’t stop payments from circumventing the built-in one, however. Given this obvious danger, and the presumed investigative abilities of the crowd, we might suppose corruption of this sort to be rare. Indeed, our algorithms might be able to detect patterns of behavior that suggest corruption, such as unusually high ratings given to someone across a very wide spectrum of views. We might also suppose that communities would enact laws against corruption with appropriate punishments, etc.