Quite a while ago i saw a thread "How to make Reddit worse". Besides adding avatars, signatures, etc, one of the most popular suggestion was to give karma a monetary value. I'm really glad it didn't happen.
Gold is thankfully not exchangeable for any goods or services though - it's really just another tier of karma.
With just karma/gold alone there's already a lot of people who spend a ridiculous amount of time farming it. Imagine if Imaginary Internet Points were redeemable for actual things.
