Abstract
Peer-to-peer complementary currencies can be powerful tools for promoting exchanges and building sustainable relationships among selfish peers on the Internet.
i-WAT[1] is a proposed such currency based on the WAT System, a polycentric complementary currency using WAT tickets as its media of exchange. Participants spontaneously issue and circulate the tickets as needed, whose values are backed up by chains of trust. i-WAT implements the tickets electronically by exchanging messages signed in OpenPGP.
This paper claims that the design of i-WAT is incentive-compatible as to protection against moral hazards, or threats caused by selfish peers because they may take advantage of the rules; such hazards are defused in i-WAT if the participants react against misbehaviors of others by pursuing their own benefits.
A reference implementation of i-WAT has been developed in the form of an XMPP instant messaging client. We have been putting the currency system into practical use since June 2004.
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Saito, K., Morino, E., Murai, J. (2006). Incentive-Compatibility in a Distributed Autonomous Currency System. In: Despotovic, Z., Joseph, S., Sartori, C. (eds) Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing. AP2PC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4118. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11925941_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11925941_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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