This is a cool idea in a similar vein to some of the other barter economy sites that have come out.

One question, does the transfer of Time Money happen before or after the actual real-world exchange? I am just wondering what types of barriers are put in place to keep everyone in the system honest.

Great great and I wish you the best!

Hey sbspalding, The transfer happens after the real-world exchange. And after the the exchange you can rate the other user or report the activity. Your profile show how many good votes you have and you can connect with other medias to show you as a reliable person.

Thanks a lot for your support.

This is pretty cool, it's one of those "classic" problems in AI/Machine intelligence. I remember working on a slightly less interesting version of this a few (many) years back when I was trying to model a swarm. That was a hardware project, but the basic structure is near identical.

We typically have a very hard time predicting the path of technological development, primarily because we have a hard time understanding when there will be inflection points that will utterly obliterate the previous status quo.

One great example is the Malthusian check/catastrophe, the idea that agricultural development would not be able to keep up with population growth and that without a plague or other substantial check on population, there would be millions of people starving.

Malthus posited this in the late-1700s and probably would have been right if the Industrial Revolution and the associated massive shifts in the technological landscape hadn't changed everything.

We can see similar ideas when we think about the various "Peak" energy scares over the last 50 years ago.

While it is absolutely true that technological stagnation occurs and possibly is occurring right now, I think we are always better off recognizing that thinking linearly about how technology develops and will develop can be a fools errand.

That's my two bitcoins.