entities 
entities
Open Money
An event in Mexico City next week put on by this guy sent to me by Melanie Swan.
Kaliya Hamlin and the re-emerging Planetwork are putting on a similar conference they are calling UnMoney in Seattle.
The boldness with which people are reconfiguring value is amazing and accelerating. I also had a really interesting conversation yesterday with a cashed out software entrepreneur who has a very interesting startup that is raising a fund (in stealth, for what seem to me kind of odd reasons, but it’s not my business) that will use its proprietary risk assessment algorythms to make loans across Prosper and all the other peer to peer lending platforms (didn’t know there were more than a dozen out there). It’s pretty amazing what you can know about somebody’s ability to repay a loan from online resources. Money, the concept and the practice of quantifying and trading value, is being re-engineered on a nearly bewildering variety of levels.
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February 29th, 2008 um 6:07 pm
I love the way we are transitioning to a supplemented-money culture, a multi-currency culture. It makes sense now that a lot of information is free, that there are other valuation mechanisms. Perhaps by the time the post-scarcity economy arrives via biotech, nanotech or artificial intelligence, traditional money will be irrelevant.
March 2nd, 2008 um 3:33 pm
It is quite fascinating the idea of non-monetary currencies and attributing explicit value to non-compensated activities.
A rich pathway to the future involves creating a multi-currency culture to support the different areas in which value is and will be created: finance, ideas, time, information, action, etc. Financial or non-monetary derivatives could be created on top of the new currencies. Imagine a call spread on community cleanup time!
Having multiple currencies would not only reflect the current and near-future state of the world more accurately but would also be good defensive positioning for future volatility and uncertainty regarding technological development and adoption.
More about the future of market mechanisms is here
March 6th, 2008 um 7:51 am
I’ve known the Open Money team for nearly a decade now, and strongly endorse their work.
Many concepts dear to social entrepreneurs will be enhanced when it’s possible to create complementary flows of value within a community, whether physical or virtual. Ithaca, NY is one of many examples where local currencies strengthen local business ecologies.
It’s hard for most people to quickly grok the power of the design of money — the current system is too ingrained in our psyche — but systems like open money provide people with a new reality that most have yet to realize.