Gold is reliable currency because you can bite it and weigh it to prove its value.  It's soft, you can sink your teeth into it, but not if it's adulterated and alloyed, and when you know it's real you can measure it with a scale, and verify value with it.

   Liberty-minded people trust and verify ~ we trust because we verify and preclude deception.  We verify an effort or enterprise like it was gold because a golden opportunity is a covered basket of golden eggs and we want them to be there.

   Even small eggs.

   Then, when we trust it, we engage it.

 

   "... but I'm certainly happy to watch someone spend their money on this kind of folly.  It's highly amusing."

   Well, in the scheme of things, we're talking about trying to exchange pennies in some constructive manner resembling what a free web-based market might look and act like.  Amusing and entertaining it will be I'm sure, as most of the interactions which take place on this forum generally are.

   In building polity of any construction you don't engineer experiment, you engineer success.  Otherwise you harness the energy and waste it, and there is not limitless replenishment, there is sustaining replenishment, to sustain success, not replace waste.  Launch effort at failure and that's what you get.

   Likewise, many interactions over the years here have been informative, insightful, educational and even brilliant.

   Well, I probably shouldn't feed all these ravenous feral egos, but off the top of my head, with a couple of lead-balloon exceptions, about the only thing I've seen around here that isn't brilliant is some of the repartee.  Even the folly around here is pretty brilliant from point to point, and certainly in plenty.  It's a pretty lively crew in the brilliance department.

   Brilliance, though, has the purpose of being illuminating, it is to see by, not look at.  The sun is brilliant, it's merely a feature of the landscape.  No one produces it, it's a given, but people become fascinated by the brilliance and fail to notice that it isn't illuminating anything.  Brilliant folly is merely more attractive.

   Engineering the death of trust in the marketplace is brilliant.  John Deere's benign neglect failed to prevent fraudulent representation in the marketplace of ideas ~ who will trust his marketplace of gold pennies unless he cleans house at Liberty Forum?  He's defeated before he starts this exercise of folly, although it's brilliant.

   Personally I've wasted money on much more dubious and far more destructive enterprises in my time.

   Liberty Forum:  Cheap Thrills since the calendars crumbled.  She's got a ticket to ride and she don't care.  Ignore the mosquitos, look at all them fish jumpin' ~ let's use a little hook just in case we don't catch any.

   That's experiment.  It's not verified.

   As to the question of trust, you raise many excellent points in your generally poetic, if "pit bull" like fashion, and all I'd offer to counter is the observation that a basis of trust and expectation of value (the all important "body" if you will) has already been established on this forum by the willingness of members to log in 24/7, year after year simply to interact or passively read those interactions.

   Baskin-Robbins had 31 flavors and Liberty Forum has thirty-one months.  Pull the plug on the fridge and the whole thing melts anyway.  Restriction has been on ice around here all that time until yesterday, and the Plan Daisy debacle fiasco melted it to steam:  it was fraudulent representation in the marketplace of ideas, the brouhaha was fraudulent representation from start to finish, and it continnues to be fraudulent representations through the destruction of thirty-one months and the institution of false restriction.

   Liberty Forum is foundering on falsity and that's the long and the short of it, and there are those who are interested in taking the Forum down by it, to shut down the free marketplace of ideas here.  Everybody can see it including those who are doing it, with a few people spinning so fast they can't see that the dervishes here spun'em up in the first place, all their spin flies away and evaporates, it hides nothing and leaves them naked in the light of truth:  several people were pretending to be one person and it's called a "violation of the spirit" of Liberty Forum to expose that fact, fraudulent representation or not.  That's the death of trust.

   That exact basis of trust is what I've been trying to deal with and recover, for days.  The body expects integrity in the marketplace of ideas, which means there will be offerings of low and even negative value.  Covering up misrepresentative marketing devices does not engender trust in the integrity of the marketplace, although "covering up" such fraudulence is admittedly difficult in a setting of such brilliance as this.  But precluding illumination of misrepresentation, however slight or commonplace the fraud, is false restriction:  it definitely destroys any expectation of integrity upon which to base any trust at all.

   "We" are a group (see my previous flag:) whether we choose to believe it or not.

   There are indications of social cohesion here that may have a potential for binding the cohesions of the factions, I'll admit that.  It's one of the things that continues to look interesting.  There are some, though, opposed to any such kind of confederation of interests that they don't dominate, and they're quite skilled at obstructing social process.  Blind Man's Bluff and Spin the Tail on the Donkey are a couple of their favorite diversionaries, and there they are pretending not to see Plan Daisy since it's been Phoenixed, and spinning themselves into asses, regular as clockwork.

   At Liberty Forum it is not possible to save a party of deception from itself.  False restriction simply condemns the enterprise of trust in the marketplace.

   "I can hardly wait to see the straight-jacket OWK comes up with for Skunk, that he convinces John Deere is a protection of privacy."

   Have a little faith.

   Reason is the root of my faith.  I have indicated what faith I have reasonably found tenable for reliance, quite explicitly:  should it seem sparing, this is merely an indication that it is earned and hard-won.  I have no truck for blind faith, I have the album with the daughter on the cover and listen to it, but I don't ride it.  When I say I believe this or that, you can rely on my validation as based on at least a preponderance of compelling evidence for which I have found no adversary contention.

   I have stated that I believe John Deere to possess integrity, to be sincere, and to represent faithfully what he aims and intends.  I base this assessment on reasoned analysis of what I consider compelling evidence and have found no adversary contention.  I am a line shaykh of the Qadiri and have unchallenged standing in the highest courts in the world of Islam, my personal seal is irrefutable certification in any venue of the Geneva Conventions.  John Deere could not obtain this from me with double his weight in gold or by any petition whatever.  It is verification.

   That says nothing about my opinion of his probable success.  It does not speak to his future.  It is not an assessment of his perspicacity or insight or competence.  It is a character reference, worth only what it is worth.

   That's faith.  I have a little.  Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.