I don't see how the alternative currency experiments like Bitcoin do anything to help us move to a more egalitarian, steady-state economy. An economist will tell you that "price is information", but I'm not sure how they justify that. An ounce of crack, a few hours of music lessons, a lawn mower, or a couple hours of labor might all be $100. None of these can remotely be considered the same, but yet the dollar value is identical. Any mechanism which equates these is an absurd abstraction which eliminates a great deal of useful information. This dearth of relational data is a fundamental feature of money which turns the economy into a valuation game. Over time, the wealth gap between those who game the system well and those that don't becomes so great that a jubilee or a revolution is needed. I see open source production and modern information technology as powerful tools which allow us to more fully value things. They are important because they help make money (just a primitive form of information technology, IMO) obsolete. I just don't understand why people want to continue to treat the economy as a game. -Karl