Experimental cryptocurrency of Burning Man.

I’d like to create a token for Burning Man, that is inspired by one of its core tenants: The gifting economy. The ethereum-based token will only be gifted, never bought or sold. Of course, as with burning man, this is an honor based system, but I think it’s likely the coin will largely adhere to this tenant, after all it has no other utilitarian value. So you can send someone a KarmaCoin the same way you’d send a bitcoin, but simply as a gesture of appreciation. It will have no monetary value, but it may be seen as somewhat of an honor to receive.

Creation: One of the first natural questions is how initial supply and creation of the token comes into existence. To insure a strong asset, it will have a fixed supply, that is locked after the creation phase. But how much to create? How to initially distribute and why? This is the interesting part: We have interested people pin actual paper US dollars to a piece of art on the playa. Then we burn the US dollars, and for every 1 dollar burned, 1 KarmaCoin is created.

specifics:

I’ll be sitting in the playa sporting 1920 accountant getup, registering everyone’s contributions.

I’ll either be:

1) handing our cards with addresses, and private keys (scratch-off) on them. The private keys will be made securely by me (trust me!), and I’ll post all details involved. OR

2) I’ll hand our worksheets, and dice. They literally follow the directions on the page, and, with my supervision, roll the dice to create random numbers as appropriate, until they have a 12-word seed/derived address made by themselves. This is cool because it will be educational and fun! Unfortunately we will need a computer to find the public key, but we can remove the reliance on an RNG which is a huge win (and I can destroy the computer at the end).

Either way, they will go home in a week and import the seed to any ERC20 compatible wallet to find their karmaCoins waiting for them.

I still need to decide what the sculpture/art-piece will be, but the idea is, some kind of steel frame that you can pin dollar bills to, and when lit, it burns nicely. Maybe just a 3d ethereum logo.

I will also not be the person to initiate the arson. I will possibly give out guy-foux masks to each contributor, and let them know the dollars are ‘intended on being burned’, but I should not for legal reasons (see trump presidency).

Along with this, I’ll be write an extensive blog article on the definition of money, and its roll in an economy. Mostly It will be to educate people, and defend the experiment. Many will be upset that “the money could have been put to good use instead of wasted”. However this is because most people do not understand money. If they did, they would see that no actual *Value* is being destroyed in this experiment, and that the deflation directly makes all other money more valuable. The exercise is mathematically equivalent to donating the money equally to all current USD holders in the world (weighted by how much they currently hold).