I can sympathise with your problem with the ribbons, and I suspect that inch-wide ribbon would be a bit much for someone with your frame in any case. It’d be nice to find a way to make it work… hm. Maybe a gorget-type necklace, something like this?

As for the ribbons, I am downright lusting after them, but unfortunately I feel strangled with anything tied around my throat.

I do see the issues with the jubilee cycle, but that only arises when people know it’s coming. Under this plan, it could happen at any point, without warning – since nobody would find themselves at zero balance or even very low afterwards, there shouldn’t be any risk to doing that.

The futures-trading issue is an interesting one, and one I’ll have to think about the implications of – thank you for bringing it up!

Regarding incentives to upvote – hmm. I’d hope that the threat of bringing on a jubilee by inflating the system unnecessarily would restrict the number of large funding suggestions, but of course I might be wrong. I hadn’t been thinking of it in terms of spending the community’s money, but I probably should.

The jubilee event has a number of problems. It guarantees the existing behaviour of recessions and expansions–in the period just before a jubilee, everyone is frantically trying to spend money, so you have an economic expansion. As soon as the jubilee hits, people will stop spending money, and you’ll get a recession. (This isn’t *really* worse than the existing system, but it’s a lot more volatile, which is a problem if you want your system to e.g. pay direct debits.)

Because of this, people are incentivized to hedge–they will want a guarantee that their money will be worth *something* tomorrow, even if it’s worth less today. They start creating futures–a very simple future is “I’ll give you E1000 tomorrow, unless we jubilee, in which case I’ll give you 0.1% of my money”. I think you’ll find it impossible to stop this. Unfortunately, you don’t even need to be incentivized to do this–future-trading agents will always end up wealthier (on average) than non-future-trading agents. Over time, the agents who develop more sophisticated algorithms for determining the expected value of money in the next (say) day, which either eliminates the jubilee (if almost everyone plays the hedge game) or systematically biases wealth to agents who’re willing to engage in financial games (which is I think the behaviour you’re trying to eliminate in our current system).

There are a number of hacks that you can do to the system to make it harder to make futures, but the hacks make the money worse (in the Gresham’s Law sense of the word), and better (ditto) money will replace it.

The second is the problem of the community funding. I am a lot less optimistic than you that this will work well–I think California’s budget-by-ballot experience tells us that a community doesn’t necessarily think well at spending the community’s money. Even if you disagree, the simplest way to get a funding proposal to pass would be to add a clause saying that the benefactor of the proposal would give every upvoter a share of the funds. The entire community is then incentivized to upvote the proposal, and in fact anyone who doesn’t upvote every proposal with that clause loses out relative to the ones who do.