The Future of Money

We can go online in the space of ten seconds

we have 20 tabs with amazing initiatives

and amazing people all around the world.

It naturally raises my standards and raises

my expectations in terms of what I can achieve.

And when I see all this stuff,

it's sort of this feeling of overwhelming

what the hell would I do with this?!

On the other hand, when I'm clear,

it's just this complete bliss and ecstasy

that there's just so much richness

and if you talk about wealth

I feel like I have the world's

collective consciousness at my fingertips

and I just feel so rich!

Alot of us had parents that were baby boomers

and potentialy disillusioned hippies.

They supported our creative side

and somehow we caught their idealism.

and now we're interested

in the structure of money.

I think it's going to be really incumbent upon

those of us for whom digital technology is more natural

to invent the systems of the future.

I can't imagine how many great ideas out there

are buried in the backs of the minds of people

-- of young students, with a lot of debt --

who just don't have the ability to pursue them.

It's like shackling our innovators.

When you base lending and credit on things like

financial history or cosigners,

those things exclude millions of people

around the world that don't have them.

However everyone has potential,

and if you can base credit on future potential,

that brings a lot more people into financial inclusion.

It's actually not a question that you pay

for what you already got,

you actually pay for what you will get.

The things that can be made because you paid.

I think one of the things that's going on right now is

a re-examination of value,

and of wealth,

and of assets,

and of a lot of words

that have a lot to do with money

but really aren't about money.

Money itself seems to be a mystery

for most people.

It is just so shockingly alien to you

if you compare it for how many

decades you are using it until you are questioning

yourself for the frist time what it really is.

We've given money the properties of the divine.

You know money is not wealth,

money is potential wealth.

But we give it such power that it influences

the way we feel about ourselves.

By experiencing a complimentary system,

I changed my notion of wealth.

People need to see themselves more as producers.

And if they see themselves as producers

they can also see that

they create the value and that there's probably

someone out there can benefit from that value.

There is actually a direct link between the kind of

new social habits we are learning online

and the social movement which is created

we're more willing to connect with someone who

we've only seen a profile of online,

and to trust them, in real space or with our time

I would share almost all of my information

with complete strangers because I feel

there's an integrity to the way I live,

and it's fine for other people to know about that.

As we work together

creating these collective projects

then trust naturally comes from that

and out of that trust we then seek to

organize new forms of social life

so trust is at the basis of the

re-creation of real communities

which are no longer bounded by place,

but are bounded by shared values.

You put yourself in a more vulnerable state

when you express what you need.

We go out and we buy it

from people we don't know,

but we don't turn to our community.

Putting all that information into one database

creates an enormous amount of potential energy.

When you know what a community needs

you know what the market demand is.

If there was a kind of bank that allowed me to

convert my money to a local currency right now,

I would do that.

Successful businesses and other

non-business organizations of the future

will have to be more transparent and more human,

and the ones that succeed in the long run

I think are going to come back

more as peers in our society

so they can behave in trustworthy ways,

rather than trying to tell us over and over again

to trust them.

Banks are going to have to evolve

to meet the new business models around

mediating trust and communities

and the ones that do are going survive

and take on a very different role,

and the ones that don't I think are just

going to go out of business.

Try to start and think in new ways

join the discussion, like this discussion,

on what's to come and what is value,

what could replace money.

It's more about creating an atmosphere

within a company or organization that allows

the people who work there to speak out

crazy ideas without being fired right away.

Think about the first days of aviation.

The Wright brothers would say,

"OK, let's make this thing fly!"

But they wouldn't think about huge infrastructure that is needed;

airports and embassies and people and security

and you know all these are huge opportunities.

The bank again is not an external entity to the community

but is an expression of the community itself.

What are the kinds of flows that we want to see?

What is that we want to shape?

What is that we want to measure?

And then try to design currencies for them.

Think about currency as

open to the principles of the free market.

Just as corporations are free to compete for

various value-creating opportunities,

currencies should be free to compete.

Different currency models competing

against one another for their ability to

serve different purposes.

We're starting to reconsider how

the commercial economy

intersects with gift exchange and the commons.

And no business likes to hear that

something of what they're doing

might fall into the commons, might be a gift,

might be very cheap to do, or easy to do

but they are, it is.

and if you actually have your eyes open and look

at those forces and understand them deeply,

you will see new business opportunities

around the commons,

contributing to the commons,

being in a symbiotic relationship

with the commons that are different

from the way we used to do business.

And I do think there is a great

money making opportunity

in currency innovation

so that rather than simply innovating

in terms of the financial instruments built on top

of the current currency system

you go underneath

and actually develop new operating systems.