PunCoin

Bitcoin, the digital currency, works because the increasing difficulty of the underlying number crunching algorithm required to create bitcoins means that only so many coins can ever be generated. This will top out somewhere around 21 million.

The first bitcoins were very easy to generate or 'mine' but later solutions became, and are ever becoming, progressively difficult to create. One pitfall of all this effort is that the solutions produce nothing other than bitcoins and the mathematical answers generated have little intrinsic value themselves.

New jokes and their variations have a similar property of increasing rarity and the inherent problem of coming up with new ones. There are very few new jokes and puns generated after thousands of years of human effort. I'm sure the Romans had mother-in-law jokes that Henny Youngman would have been proud to pass off as his own. The same goes for Jerry Seinfeld and CK Lewis although new material does still occur.

The PunCoin monetary system would rely upon computer analysis of the underlying concepts of jokes as well as a human jury to determine whether a joke or pun is indeed new and 'funny' enough to qualify as a joke. I'd suggest that different categories of jokes would have different valuations with esoterical observations of the human condition being of generally higher value than say, fart jokes - with puns being equivalent to small change.

The advantage of PunCoin over bitcoin is that, besides its value as a currency, it provides humanity with some extra laughs. Much funnier than some dry algorithmic solution at any rate. What's more, the Halfbakery would become a goldmine!