In an article ((Applications of Security Deposits and Prediction Markets #citation) You Might Not Have Thought About) over on the Ethereum Foundation's blog, they talk about using security deposits to weed out bad actors from being able to spam your email.
Essentially, you send your email with a security deposit. If the receiver of your email likes your email, the deposit is returned to your with no penalty. But if the receiver of the email doesn't like the email, they press a button that eats up the security deposit.
That creates a very high cost to writing spam emails. It cuts into the profits significantly.
I also read an article from Bob Murphy ((The Social Function of Stock Speculators #citation)) about the role of stock speculators. One thing he talks about is how the people that are bad at trading stocks (according to Taleb ((Fooled by Randomness #citation)), the fragile actors) get weeded out because they lose their money. Conversely, the folks that spend the time learning how to trade stocks are rewarded (Aggressive gameplay earns big rewards) with enough money to make it worth it to stick around and keep doing what they were doing.
To be good at trading stocks requires a solid understanding of economics, both technically and fundamentally. Becoming good at this trade means you become a more knowledged ( -(Maximize Gains and Minimize Losses #citation)) person economically.
Both these two examples are based on the same principle - making it more expensive to be a bad actor than to be a good actor.
The cool thing about this is that it's a way that allows anyone to use the system, but the bad actors - the ones not useful to the system - get weeded out naturally (Non-aggression principle #zt).
#capitalism #toolong