"There's a spiffy young fellow I'm betting on : the GPG Contract. He's also a. an agreement b. reached by willing participants. But that's all.
What do I mean "that's all" ? I literally mean, that's all. A contract which is entered into by willing participants and won't be enforced. Nonsense ? IKR!
Except not really. Obviously entering into a GPG Contract thinking it's an Old Contract is nonsense, and will get you burned. In fact the history of "scams" in the Bitcoin space is pretty much this, people behaving with what should really be GPG Contracts as if they were Old Contracts, and then discovering midway through that... well... it doesn't really work that way.
But if you go in knowing that the contract won't be enforced, you can actually act quite rationally. Online identities are obviously a dime a dozen, in fact in the time I took to write this opus I might have made a few million. However, because of GPG they are in fact identities. Add to this the fact that nobody forces you to venture money in a deal with something that's worth a dime a dozen and suddenly some sense begins to emerge.
Sure all identities are a dime a dozen, but with the passing of time and the accumulation of history they become differentiated, and through this differentiation acquire value. When people see 2FB7B452 at the end of a signed document they don't think "a dime a dozen", they think "a guy valued around half a million BTC or thereabouts, my fifty should be safe then". Why should his fifty be safe then ? Because the value to me of not having a fifty bitcoin default added to my track record is actually larger than fifty bitcoins, and so rationally my best choice is to actually live up to the deal, whatever it may be."