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Imagine online financial accounts that could reproduce at their owner's command -- instantly creating new accounts that can also reproduce, through any number of generations, creating family trees. These accounts can inherit money from their parent; more importantly can inherit any number of online services, options, permissions, security tools, and other methods and capabilities. This inheritance of services and methods creates a decentralized financial infrastructure that allows accounts to evolve in community use, toward greater usefulness and popularity -- while complex payments and accounting can happen automatically, with little or no need for human attention.
The reproducing account is a new concept that we believe will have endless uses. Consider:
Artists who produce music, video, pictures, or other downloadable material could sell it at whatever price -- a dollar a copy, $50, 25 cents, or even less than a penny. Usually they will not sell individual copies, but rather unique URLs (Web addresses) containing any number of prepaid downloads the buyer can share with others. The buyer will pay by credit card, etc., and sponsor the art by distributing copies of the URLs to friends and social networks. End users anywhere will just click the URL to stream or download the art free (no payment processing or registration of any sort required) -- instantly paying the artist by the act of free downloading itself. Artists might allow sponsors to include an acknowledgement, advertising, or other message if they wish -- or disallow these messages, or moderate them. So sponsors can support the artists, create gifts for their friends, and target their own messages through their own social networks, all with the same purchase.
The setup to go into business and sell a song or other art, published article, Web page access, database access, or other online service this way, throughout the world, could take only a few minutes -- since accounts will often inherit popular configurations and services from ancestor accounts used by previous owners who ran a very similar business (or from starter accounts created by professionals). For example, bankcard processing and permissions, and software for uploading the music or other content for sale, can be inherited through generations of accounts. Only a few fields in the account's control panel will need to be changed for the new business. And any future generations of the URL will inherit the changes -- by default, unless other rules are set.
Note: This ordinary, clickable URL is a smart account -- one form that the account can take. When clicked, it reaches the record for that account, in a database of accounts maintained on a server. The account can provide prepaid content (such as a song) to the end user -- or request payment if the prepaid copies are exhausted. The end user can download free if a copy is available, purchase one download, or purchase thousands of downloads, instantly recharging all copies of that URL anywhere in the world, for thousands of people to share and use. We guesstimate that about 98% or more of all downloads through this system will be free -- supported by sponsorships purchased by the other 2%.
Also, since the smart account (the URL) can reproduce, any end user could purchase a new, unique URL to share the same art within his or her own social networks exclusively -- and not with everyone else in the world who happened to have a copy of the original URL.
Many copies of these URLs will circulate indefinitely in different social networks, getting recharged as necessary and automatically paying the artists as long as there is public interest. Even if they digitally collect dust for years, they can still remain active, ready to be used if interest picks up later.
The artists could be even in the poorest countries, without computers -- and earn considerable money for themselves and their communities if their design, performance, story, appeal, cause, advice, religion, or other work becomes popular.
In case of a disaster, trusted relief organizations could set up an appeal where each contribution instantly shows up on a public Web site if the donor wishes (perhaps on an animated map, color-coded by amount -- or with the donor's name or other brief message). Also, donors could see exactly where their contribution goes -- down to a specific supplier, for example; and they could actually increase a specific shipment of food or other necessities to the disaster area, or give enough to complete the order and release it immediately. Such systems could be running all the time, with backup servers contracted in case of sudden demand. Then when a disaster occurs, the relief organization can update the specifics (at their smart-account's control center) to show the new situation on the ground, and engage donors with attractive options for how their money can help.
For any fundraising (not only disasters), organizations could challenge each other to a "financial tug of war" -- a very efficient fundraiser in which the key to success is organizing major donors, and deploying them strategically. A public or private Web page will help motivate the contest by showing up-to-the-second results of how the two or more teams are doing. Anyone who makes a donation, anywhere in the world, will see its effect on the game immediately.
All these accounts will offer standard business and fundraising transactions in any number of different human languages. Any user will be able to change the language (perhaps by clicking on a country flag, or on the name of the language); this will modify the URL so that the new language is displayed by default as that URL circulates within a country or other language group. Sellers, buyers, and end users can all be in different parts of the world, and do business even if they have no language in common.
As long as they can use an ever-growing set of standard business or donation transactions, artists, merchants, and fundraisers will have the benefit of dozens of languages automatically available, if they use a smart account that provides them. They will not need to do anything to get this benefit; if URLs circulate successfully in other parts of the world, the money will just show up in their accounts. But they could have the option of blocking any languages they do not want to support in that offer or campaign.
Besides conventional security options, these accounts will offer new ones. For example, owners could instantly create a new account containing only a small amount of money, limiting any possible loss. Or a new account could be irrevocably restricted to specific, secret payees -- or be good for only one transaction, after which it will self-destruct and return any remaining money to its owner a secret, irrevocable account (or by mailing a check). And in case an account might have been compromised, the owner could push a few buttons on a telephone to empty or destroy it instantly, returning any funds to the owner.
Accounts could contain no personally identifying information, to avoid identity theft; whether or not to allow truly anonymous payment is a separate, political decision. Accounts will automatically keep records of all uses and attempts, unless asked not to.
"Public accounts" will be irrevocably restricted so that they can only receive money on behalf of their owner, and never give any money out. Therefore they can be published and used to convey business offers (such as the free download of a particular prepaid song), usually with no need for encryption. SSL or other encryption will be needed for other uses, especially for owners to communicate with the control panels of each of their accounts.
Perhaps most importantly for security, owners could set their accounts to refuse to pay money to any party not meeting certain standards of trust. These standards could be provided by any number of third-party trust organizations, each promising different kinds of investigation and oversight of sellers, fundraisers, or other payees. For example, a minimal trust guarantee could be maintained by unlisting any account believed to be used fraudulently.
These smart-accounts will have many other uses, some of them unusual. For example, the same accounts that offer the services above could also be programmed to send emails or postal mail, or make telephone calls its owner recorded, at any specific future time -- or based on a contingency, such as 60 days after the owner's death. It should cost only a few dollars to have a short announcement published years, decades, or centuries in the future, a little more for video; these purchases might be useful as novelty gifts, although performance could not be guaranteed. The price could include contracts with a consortium of organizations offering such long-term services, so that if some go out of business, others will take on their commitments. (And if the human race is extinct by the programmed time, no one will complain about non-fulfillment.)
Another unusual possibility is that for some business transactions (such as access to newspaper archives), buyers' and sellers' accounts could negotiate prices or other terms with each other automatically, with no human involvement unless the robots cannot reach agreement and have to bump the decision upstairs to a person. Third-party organizations could maintain and sell plug-in negotiating strategies, based on current business data.
In entertainment, the same accounts could also sell digital, paperless tickets to admit individuals or groups to shows. And they could allow restaurants to publicly select their best and/or worst days, so that diners could check the Web and show up for their top food and service, not when the best cook is out sick. The server would average the self-ratings, so that a restaurant that rated itself as best on every day would show up as average on every day.
For financial education, smart-accounts could let children invest pocket change in financial funds that track indexes, stocks, calls, foreign currencies, commodities, or any other investment choices the school running the program decided to provide for them. The children could follow real market numbers, illustrated with colorful, animated displays. They could change their investments any time they wanted, either free, or for a fee chosen only for its educational value.
Other articles on this site outline many additional uses for smart-accounts. For example, collecting and trading digital collectibles will be a world of its own -- and could turn ordinary charitable donations of money or services into personal investments as well, enhancing fundraising by creating a new motive to give.
Smart accounts will clearly have many other uses that no one has yet imagined.
Sorry, no implementation yet. Elsewhere on this site I've shown how to do everything above and much more, but I'm not the one to write the code. My role is to develop the ideas and put them on the table for public discussion and use, either in open-source and/or commercial projects. I have no proprietary claims, and want these ideas to be freely available.
These smart-accounts will be easy to introduce, for several reasons:
Reproducing accounts will not replace current financial systems -- but work with them to make new business models feasible.
We have not heard of anyone else who has designed, implemented, or even imagined any form of reproducing financial accounts. The idea could not have worked until the widespread use of ecommerce in recent years. If you know of other projects involving reproducing accounts, please let us know through www.smart-accounts.org
We are looking for ideas on how to proceed. This innovation could help artists anywhere make a living, make sharing easier in a time of increasing inequality, empower small independent businesses, and otherwise help build a better world.
We have designed one way to implement reproducing financial accounts (there are other ways). For more information on our design, see A Radically New Way to Use Money Online: Smart-Accounts for Selling Art and Information -- and the more detailed articles linked to it.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
We have no patent or other proprietary claims to the ideas discussed here.