TG
The main point that I believe you've "got wrong" is that you've started from the wrong end of the 'market-sequence' -

MJ
If by market sequence you mean reputation
-> trust -> respect -> attention -> transaction [ -> barter/money -> individualised 'profit' ] , then our difference probably comes from the fact that I think that is a scale specific model, that doesn't hold at the scale of the more abstract conversation. I think a more accurate formulation for our purposes is
reputation -> trust -> respect -> attention -> transaction . If successful, then -> +reputation ->trust ->respect ->attention ->transaction. If successful, then -> reputation -> etc etc.

Money in this construct is merely a visible token of the exchange.

On a side note, I think some your insights into enterprise architecture could be very fruitful to disentangle the the communication flows and thus the culture of high school dropout factories.

Scale is a valid concern that I'd agree I haven't dealt with in this example - I'm really only talking about the individual-transaction sequence here.

The point that you're missing is that if you start from the barter/money/profit end, you are in effect *assuming* a possession-based economy - which a) is a special-case, that b) is individual-focussed and therefore takes little to no account of network-effects, and c) is *fundamentally* non-sustainable. (I'll explain the reasoning on that some other time if that isn't immediately obvious to you.)

If you start from the other end, at 'reputation', you are a) dealing with what is common to all economy-types, and hence b) *are* able to observe network-effects (of which reputation itself is one). *Do not make the mistake of assuming that a possession-economy is inevitable* - many cultures do *not* operate on a possession-based model.

(continues)

(continued)
The briefest summary is that the possession-model brings very good short-term advantages within an open context - i.e. an 'infinite growth' pyramid-scheme. However, any real-world context is *not* infinite, and the model is guaranteed to fail as soon as it hits the limits of the pyramid - which started to happen somewhen within the past century, and we are now well past recovery on a very large number of factors such as peak-oil. By contrast, a responsibility-based economy (perhaps best typified by the Australian Aboriginal legal system) does permit a fully sustainable model even under severe environmental stress (60,000 years so far, including two complete Ice Age cycles). However, the classic Aboriginal models were usually small-group nomadic (with some important exceptions), whereas most current societies are high-density static-urban - hence we can't simply transcribe the classic Aboriginal models into an urban context. A *lot* of work needs to be done to adapt responsibility-based principles into a modern urban context. But we can't do that from the barter/money end of the 'market-sequence', because it assumes a possession-model; instead, we *must* start from the other end, and rethink everything as we go.

It's not top-down as such: the only top-down part is to identify and establish the core drivers (conceptualised vision, values, principles etc). That then provides an architectural reference-point for bottom-up experimentation.

But what I *can* tell you with some certainty is that whilst some types of currency-model *may* be useful for transitional purposes, they *must* all be discarded at some point, because - as artefacts of a possession-based model - they would eventually *guarantee* failure if we continued to use them. In the long-term, a possession-based model *cannot* be sustainable - and sustainability is one of the key requirements that we most need in a viable economy.

"The point that you're missing is that if you start from the barter/money/profit end, you are in effect *assuming* a possession-based economy"

I guess I didn't make it clear that I am NOT starting from the barter/money/profit end.

I'm starting from reputation and saying that the barter/money profit end should not be in the sequence at all. It is merely the outcome at the scale of enterprises whose purpose is money. Frankly, I am not concerned with organizations whose purpose is money. What I'm trying to say is that that if the items within the { } is social capital, it's alot more useful to what I'm interested in.