The Economist has a special section on The Future of Money about smart cards and people using cell phones for remittance payments (sending money back to momma in Mexico). It also talks about the peer to peer nature of the new banks on cell phones that are arising; people storing money on their phones and sending to another person in country, for casual purchases, and through some new virtual banks that only exist in the airwaves between two cell phones.

The radically distributed nature of the new money has a hidden, culturally and financially destabilizing element, if we can figure out how to use it. This new fluid configuration of money is a key opportunity for the social capital market to reach its potential in time.

What is the new money? It’s currency as myinformation; think Myspace meets Citibank in an infinite variety of cultural forms. It’s built up through some social or financial transaction, that can be chits built up through fighting as an elf against a demon in World of Warcraft, or remittances sent from the US to Mexico that are then traded, inside or outside of traditional financial institutions. The coin of whatever realm you chose to identify with. It’s big. It’s getting bigger and could make a big difference to the social capital market.

That’s because the new money has a deeply new nature; it’s not hierarchical and it owes fewer cultural debts to the old way we thought about money. Instead. the value can be set by any group of people; it’s peer to peer capital. This difference can perhaps best be seen by what’s not there. With this new fungible and slippery money there is neither a central bank nor a centralized foreign exchange mechanism (pesos to dollars price set from above). So value is as fluid in its configuration as a bit, a one or a zero in a word document when you hit cut and paste. It’s value is wrapped up in the meaning you and the other parties place on it.

There is no single arbiter of value in this world of virtual currency. That means the definition of value can be changed by people, acting together. That’s one reason it’s important that Interra, after years of slogging away, the kind of trial and error that comes from doing something really new and really hard, is finally in a real world trial in Boston. And it’s why it’s not surprising that an ipod or any other mobile device that stores data can be considered a criminal tool, either. But those are side notes to my real point. This new landscape that doesn’t cowtow to old values has the opportunity to establish it’s own.

This is the possibility that is opening up, I think: Changing the definition of value is a massive growth opportunity for the businesses run on a basis of blended value; (businesses run to produce a mix of social and financial value) to capture their true monetary return in an open exchange.

Because of that culturally structural divide (it’s the way people think about their money that sets the traditional capital market value for any company. It’s not set in stone or even on a balance sheet; it’s set within a culturally conditioned mindset) money invested in 2007 in the social capital market comes back with a discount to financial return because the cost of doing good is carried by the philanthropic part of the blended value equation. And the traditional philanthropic capital market is less efficient than the traditional capital market because it’s often less clear why something fails or succeeds or why something gets funded or doesn’t. It occurs to me that the battle for the hearts and minds that the players in the social capital market will be waging using this new currency is a network war; it’s more Al Queda vs. Bush than Roosevelt and Churchill vs. Stalin and Hitler, but that’s a thought for another day. (When I get on a roll I can’t help coming up with historical analogies; ignore ‘em or enjoy ‘em.) What does all this mean to the average person? If the players in the social capital market learn how to establish the value of their initiatives in the new, more open virtual currency world, the financial return for doing good could go up and the cost of doing bad could rise alongside it.

We are riding a wave; people are thinking and acting in new and better ways with their money, realizing their impact in the world is one of the key parameters to use when making a financial decision. New tools like the new virtual and distributed currency are coming online that could help us ride that wave more quickly. If the way people are thinking about money is changing, then the people using the new currency, money which hasn’t inherited historic baggage about risk and return paradigms, can adopt new methods of establishing value more easily than the tired old guardians of the old values, the sons of Milton Friedman who don’t want to consider the impact of their financial decisions, can latch onto and quench the new possibility. People power, coupled with the distributed pricing power that the new money allows, can be a powerful tool for good.