A post on currency via twitter:
Some of you may know that I have roots in a community called Planetwork that has had an interest in ‘alternative’ currency and the role that digital identity could play a role in a emergent currency systems.
So, today my interest was peaked by this e-mail from Biz Stone at Twitter talking about an interesting new application being built on twitter.
http://www.identitywoman.net/twitter-and-emerging-currency
What is Identity?
Last week at the ITU-T meeting in Geneva there were some folks making the assertion that Identity was all about one’s credentials starting first and foremost with one’s birth certificate. Clearly credentials that are abstract representations of our selves have value in our world and let us do things that we were not able to do when identity was just social. Much like the fact
Hernando DeSoto points out in the Mystery of Capital that abstract representations of ownership of things (like deeds of ownership of houses – that say you own your house) has value because now you can do new things you couldn’t do before when ownership was just social (my neighbors know I own my house because I do – no piece of paper says this).
http://www.identitywoman.net/what-is-identity
And an older post.
Representational System Breakdown
cc: representational system breakdown – Hernando DeSoto & the Mystery of Captal
The below carbon copy mix up was in the same article as the Feinstein Article in the previous post. Really interesting and highlights the fragility of paper records that are still in abundance today. Again it highlights the challenge we have today – and explosion of records about ourselves. Every place we do business with. How do we manage this and know our ‘secrets’ are kept secrets.
Hernando DeSoto dives into the Mystery of Capital (I am reading the book now) and clearly articulates why it works in the west. We westerners don’t even see what it is and why it works because it just is. At the core are the representational systems that we use for things – the deeds for houses, the ownership of businesses etc. These documentation and representational systems are key to the efficient leverage and flow of capital. If we can succeed to new representational systems for people – persistent digital identity – the “big bang” comes in part from our being able to harness our own identities with a representation systems in new ways never before possible. …