Told or Known

About Trade A Favor 

Interesting concept. Do you think it has a future?

No, I don’t, although I kinda wish it did (but not because it’s cool).

I wish it had a future so we could watch them rediscover all the reasons we have money in the first place. Direct barter just doesn’t work for the general case. The contrived example in the video is a perfect illustration. How many songwriters do you suppose are going to be able to find a muffler repair shop that needs some bespoke music, and agrees that the parts and labor are of equivalent value?

Trade A Favor is probably thinking they can eliminate this problem by increasing their user base, but this it not something you can just “network effect” away. There is a way to make it work, of course, and that would be the introduction of an abstraction to represent value. Basically it would be a symbol representing a certain amount of time and/or effort, measured in its own units so that all products and services can have their values translated into those units for comparison and exchange. This is called money, and if this service survives long enough they will inevitably reinvent it.

I always find it amusing when people want to reintroduce inefficiencies to systems and market them as improvements.