Re: Ahh, old timers
If only there was some other way of moving money around. Perhaps one which relied on physical tokens which would be difficult or impossible for the government to track. Good thing we've got the blockchain for that though, because there's no way anyone could come up with anything similar.
You could call it Computer Aided Special Holograms maybe?
During the Dot Com bubble my boss at the time went to a meeting at a startup. He wasn't going to go at all but there was another meeting nearby and he figured what the hell. It was a sort of loyalty system for websites where you gained a token for visiting a site. These tokens would then be exchangeable for something later on when you had enough. I think they described it as a digital version of Green Shield Stamps. My boss said he asked at the very start of the meeting what the minimum spend was to obtain a token. Well there wasn't one all you had to do was visit the site and from memory that was it. You could only get one token per day per site.
He said he spent the rest of the meeting looking at emails on his BlackBerry hidden behind the literature he was given to read. He said they obviously hadn't considered the possibility that somebody might just set all the sites that offer tokens up as favourites/bookmarks. Then just open them once a day say when you started the computer. Also that didn't create loyalty as they may also sign up your competitor. They wanted companies to pay to be part of it with the minimum plus point for the company of extra traffic to the site. They wanted us to sign up and he said he'd put it to the board. That was his way of saying it wasn't going to happen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
