The Whuffie Bank
Tante recently twitter a link to the Whuffie bank, a non-profit organization that is trying to build up a currency based on (internet) reputation.
Playing Eve Online this got my attention as currently in Eve Online reputation is the only thing you have of value that is “uncontrolled” and still has to account for a lot of ingame “wealth”.
IRL if you go up to a bank or loan somebody cash, your contract is to a degree secured by laws and enforcement of these laws. In the virtual economy that Eve is, the only thing you have as a measure of insurance is the reputation that the person you loan ISK (the ingame currency) has.
This leads to the fact that people would start banks or IPOs to raise interests of other people ingame to loan them money up to certain amount, keeping up their reputation till they reach the “sweet spot” and run off with the cash.
A new account and a new character later and all the ISK is through the laundry and not trackable anymore for the other players that invested in this IPO or put their ISK into that virtual bank. As this is a player driven world, the players itself are responsible for keeping true to their word and their contracts and with the game – taking place in the internet – scammers and thiefs and griefers are all around.
Recently one of the last major banks in Eve Online failed, as the one of the director ran off with a lot of cash. A bank that had the reputation of being the only bank to hold true running for almost two years.
Some say in the end it was just “a scam waiting to happen”.
CCP wants to introduce a “space book” for their game in the near future. A facebook like functionality for the ingame characters, where these characters can display their employment history and social ingame networks as well standing lists to each other.
Actually that step is the first step in better visualizing the networks the different ingame characters have to each other. So far the reputation of character is mainly based on his doings in game (naturally) as well as his post on the official or other game related forums.
By introducing their ingame version of Facebook these connections become visible all in one place. With this it basically lays the foundation for better visualizing the social network the game build up itself and further strengething the value of ingame reputation. Still this reputation is not very liable, as a character can be build up and discarded as pleased, there is no “hard” way to track the reputation or to not fall for an con artist.
The Whuffie bank now is starting out of game but still on the internet, starting with little (or too much) RL world connection the user has, namely his “social network”.
Using the Whuffie Bank as positive credit account in Eve you could tie a character to a RL person and not just a character ingame, you could build up a trust system build on the reputational wealth a person has on the Whuffie Bank.
But these are just my musings as a gamer 
.