Indie Time Bank

Either way In theory a D Wave - Quantum computer would plow through more mining than anything else out there therefore changing the bitcoin economy.

 

A lot of people are using the example Pro Programmer (with lots of investment in skills/knowledge) vs Artist.

But a great Artist on any project is worth their weight in gold, and have probably spent just as long learning their art as a great programmer has.

The general Heuristic is it takes 10 years of hard work and constant learning to become really great at what you do.

OK try this for a thought experiment, take the most amazing AAA game you have seen, now remove all the textures, and reduce the polygons, replace with programmer art.

For me Battlefield 4 or Crysis 3 just went from AAA to 1980's LEGO.

But if your great at programming and or art, your only interest with a time bank would be to help others and share your knowledge.

The arguments your making are all about money, a time bank is an alternate economy, think of it as a way to invest in your fellow indies to share and build up a spirit of community and to share your time equitably.

Money is just a promise your government printed onto a piece of paper, but if you look at their balance sheets how much is it really worth?

 

Sure, a great artist is worth their weight in gold. What about the not-so-great ones?

The issue isn't value inequality between skillsets, it's value inequality between experience levels in the same skill set.

As I said, I might be able to do something in an hour that would take someone else a day / 8 hours. So my experience, which allows me to get a better job done in less time, means that when doing that job I earn less than a less experienced person doing an inferior job. In other words, my experience has a negative value in this form of economy.

The same problem applies to artists and writers and... well, any form of skilled job.

And this isn't an argument about money. It's an argument about value. Why should someone with 10 years experience in a particular field believe that their time is worth the same as someone with no experience in that field? Money is indeed a "shared fiction", but it's one that exists to solve a very real problem. If the shared fiction itself didn't hold significant value we certainly wouldn't have kept it around.

 

OK So all you all are saying is that you need to find someone with a similar level of skill to yourself with regard to their productivity.

Only productivity is not really just one hour is it, most things you do in game development are iterative, in that your initial work moves towards providing a solution to the problem at hand.

Therefore even time sharing with someone of lesser but good enough skills can allow you to get more done.

Example -
Genius Programmer Al can code really fast and well.
Average but Good 3D/2D Artist Bob.

Al spends two days 16 hours working on Bobs project making the code sing and getting the game up to 60FPS on the target platform.
Bob improves the artwork and adds in more polish to complete the game during this time.

Now Al goes back to his own project and works on the core of his engine.
He then gets Bob produce some great art for the game while he works on the engine.

Now as in all game project without a game earning money both Al and Bob may not have a lot to spend but using a Time Bank they can help each other in parallel allowing both to be more productive with the time they have.

If Bob had released a poorly performing game he would have made a fraction of the potential sales.
If Al had released a game with low quality artwork he would also have a fraction of the potential sales.

There is nothing stopping Al and Bob from using the Time Bank and agreeing to a Royalties Share.

Note: I think money belongs to the banks and governments we probably have very little influence on it especially with the crazy monetary system of Wall Street et al.

 

I don't have a comment on the feasibility of a time bank and I'm not knocking this idea. But I do not value 1 hour of my time to be equal to 1 hour of someone else's time.

Because for example I might have 30 years experience in something and can solve a problem in one minute, while someone else might solve a problem in an hour. So am I supposed to then give that person 60 of my hours?

It's never going to work out at my level, but it will work fine I think, for newbies just learning unity.

 

Sure, but Al gets 16 hours of average-value time (comparatively little prior investment) in exchange for 16 hours of premium-value time (comparatively large prior investment). How is that an equal value proposition?

Yes, but there are two things to note here. First, your point of comparison is not getting anything done. Secondly, this system does nothing to address making sure that the skill on offer is "good enough". Also, it still doesn't solve the value imbalance.

If there's a royalty share then what purpose does the time bank serve? Oddly enough, just proposing a royalty split is solving the value inequality by using money - the very thing that you're trying to avoid with the whole time bank system.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the system is fundamentally broken because there is no balancing mechanism in place governing the value of trades. It's strongly tilted towards people with under-developed skills because their time is comparatively over-valued, and people which highly-developed skills will avoid it because their time is comparatively under-valued. If you look at it statistically, people with highly-developed skills must, on average, trade for lower-value time than they are offering.

Please don't misunderstand me. I love the idea of a non-debt-based value and trading system, and I love toying around with the idea. But at the same time I can't help but feel that the idea is utopian by its very nature.

 

OK then whats to stop people who use the time bank for asking for a higher rate of exchange, inequality resolved!

 

Nothing, but you just invented money.

 

Why can't we just use money?

 

Rather than considering time, if you want some sort of non monetary bartering system, it would be better to setup an exchange of "deliverable assets". People post what they want to have (a model with a certain describable style and example quality for example) vs. a set of code to accomplish a specific task or set of tasks. In that way, people can basically just barter trade at whatever value they decide is equitable, and get the deliverable they want. Time to finish becomes irrelevant to the exchange, and only relevant to the people doing the work. So very skill people can do work of equal value, in less time, or less skilled can do the same work in more time, if they feel it is equitable to what they receive. I'm not sure the specific logistics of it, but time equality is a fallacious concept because, tasks don't have equal value, final results don't have equal value, and the time to complete things is not the same from person to person.

 

On equality of time, lets say you have 24 hours left to live?

Redbeer, the idea behind a time bank is that time is the one thing we all have but it's finite, only 24 hours in a day 365 in a year and about 70 in a lifetime. Also it's a precious resource and one that you don't realize you wasted until it's gone.

One way to make the most of your time is to collaborate with others with different or complementary skills to make something better and faster than you could on your own.

I think I'll set up a time bank account for this thread as it's using up a lot of my time to argue with people who don't seem to grasp the core concept or the potential for this to become a community of game jams a sharing of knowledge and skills that by definition would make the users more 'wealthy'.

If you want to try it please do, if not then don't.

"All you have is a little time."