My (recent) understanding of gift economies is that the rules are quite distinct from money economies.
In a gift economy, one gives a gift without any certainty about when (or even if) the gift will be repaid. There is no real notion of “balancing the books”, where a gift X will be repaid by gifts Y and Z of equal value. “Record-keeping” (among the vast majority of people) is much looser. Gift economies are both about moving goods and services among people and also about the continual maintenance of individual-to-individual social ties.
In a money economy, the focus is on the transaction rather than the people involved. When I’m buying a candy bar, I don’t depend on nor create a social relationship with the convenience store clerk - no more than I would with a vending machine.
(As I remember it) Raymond’s conception of a gift economy treats status as roughly the same thing as money: you can accumulate it (regardless of other people) and you can spend it (it doesn’t matter who’s the counterparty to the transaction). This is made even more explicit in Doctorow’s idea of “whuffie”, which is as exactly quantified as money.
I haven’t read Raymond’s essay for a long time, so I may be off-base, but he seemed to focus on Pacific Northwest Potlatches. Those were atypical in two ways. First, they took place in a society in upheaval (there was a gold rush of new wealth because of the contact with European civilization). Second, potlatches were all about high-status males displaying prowess for other high-status males. The gifting behavior of high-status males is different from the bulk of the population in many gift economies. What I think is more interesting (and relevant) is the gift superstructure among the bulk of the community, including especially the network of support between the alpha males and the rest of the people. I remember reading of one particular people where it was both explicit and not-really-mentioned that the king existed because of what the rest of the people gave him (and that he - at some indeterminate time - gifted back to them). That’s different from the potlatch-derived notion of Great Powers competing by disposing of wealth they got from… well, it’s not mentioned.
Too much open source discussion focuses on uber-hackers, ninjas, rock stars, etc: the Pacific NW alpha males who used their access to immense excess to expand their scope of influence. But those alpha males would not exist without a complex infrastructure. I suspect it keeps the ninjas in line and keeps them from too-destructive monstrosities of ego. [In a stable society, which the potlatch society was not.]
Disclaimer: I am but a dabbler in these subjects.
