Here is a Guardian piece about virtual money on the Internet.

It’s by Aleks Krotoski:

Aleks Krotoski has been writing about interactivity since 1999. She has a PhD in the social psychology of relationships in online communities

It’s not quite clear to me what her point is here:

Trust has become the pinnacle of virtual currency. It’s what people depend upon to function online. It is the source of our reputations in the virtual space.

But there is no cash to create the tangible IOU, so we create recommendations engines and ratings systems, and rely on links from friends to get worthwhile information.

Trust is money online: it’s what we have, and what we have not.

The web really has done very little to transform our social concept of money – if anything, it’s made us more aware of its true philosophical underpinnings, and has divorced it from the paper stuff in our wallets…

But the philosophical underpinnings of the ‘social concept of money’ are NOT divorced from the paper stuff in our wallets!

See eg the Eurozone crisis – caused by the fact that the currency’s very philosophical underpinnings are unsound, so people don’t believe that EU state debt can honestly be repaid. Ditto unease about the US dollar – it is no longer looking honest as federal and state debts burst through the roof.

Remember this?

Here is a great Powerline piece looking at the severe belt-tightening going on in Washington to ‘slash’ the unsustainable federal budget. It uses easy to grasp imagery…

Back with Aleks, read the Comments where Tim Worstall and I both offer our thoughts (his, of course, rather smarter than mine).