Based on your It's basically a 'rich' guy's upvoteI realized about halfway through that I was being really negative, and that wasn't my intention. I get very worried when people start putting price tags on opinions, and when free discourse becomes a market. Things can go very bad in a very short amount of time, and it worries me (just look at the evening news). 1ยข is basically nothing, I get that. I worry about down the road.
This is exactly my opinion. Commerzialized opinions are inherently bad and in social networks this can create a distribution worse than the power of law distribution. It discourages new users and encourages circlejerking.marks
idea I want to propose something: How about you can buy 1 mark for $1 and these you can use like badges or upvotes and show your appreciation and these are then added to the account of the user you gifted them. This user than can give them a different user as appreciation, though with every new 'transaction' the mark looses in value (like a coin, that gets more and more marks of destruction, up to a point (10 txs?), that it can't be sent anymore. If you buy marks, these don't get added to your account, so no hoarding ensues or 'bought appreciation' is created. Also you see how much marks a user had, like "10 marks currently (25 marks total)", so hoarding gets discouraged and they get passed along. To show on the profile a mark with less 'value' got send, either you display them next to each other or you can use decimal digits ({1,...,0.1} at the first tx the mark doesn't use value).