Speaker :  John S. James

Date : Saturday October 1, 2011 — 1pm

Room : Tuttleman 400 A/B

Track : General Interest

Level : Newbie : NO experience required, Beginner: Basic knowledge and limited practical experience, Intermediate: Significant knowledge, Advanced: Technical and practical proficiency

This accidental innovation lets financial account to replicate (reproduce — creating “child” accounts, grandchildren, ancestors and descendents), when their owner wants. All sorts of goodies flow from this design, with its great ease of creating any number of new, related accounts, each with any amount of customized services already set up. Accounts can inherit unlimited settings instantly, at “birth.” Therefore owners can create all sorts of special-purpose accounts (which would be difficult and unfeasible with ordinary, non-reproducing accounts).

To our knowledge, this innovation has never before existed in the history of money. It could not have worked without e-commerce. We are developing it as an open-source project, so anyone can use these ideas.

How could replicating accounts be useful in practice?

Example: spam control (and fundraising, also)

An owner might create an account with only $1 in it — and restrict the account so that it cannot pay anything except to one particular recipient, a premium email-forwarding service in this case. This account could be pasted into an unencrypted email, since it isn’t worth stealing (due to the small amount, the restriction to one payee, and the ability of the account to report unauthorized use). Then anyone, even celebrities, can get a forwarding address that charges the sender some amount (like 5 cents) and pays the recipient (minus one or two percent to the forwarding service). Five cents will stop almost all untargeted spam — and allow the $1 account to deliver 20 emails to 5-cent-premium addresses.

Email senders will not need any advance setup with the forwarding service — they will only need to have any RepliCounts-type or other payment service that the forwarding company accepts. Without payment, email to a premium address bounces, with no “attention cost” to the intended recipient. So anyone can publish a special email address to receive emails from anybody (even strangers) willing to pay 5 cents to to reach them — or 50 cents per email, or $50. Occasionally someone in the public eye could make a living and pay bills just by receiving email — perhaps an indigent victim of injustice.

Fundraising uses for organizations are obvious. Less obvious: organized, worldwide fundraising contests and other games, played in many languages, could be set up in an afternoon — since each game can start with an account that inherits much of the setup and know-how from previously successful campaigns.

Example: artists selling their work online, free to end users, through mass sponsorship.

Replicating accounts will also support a new and different way for artists to get paid for their music, video, reporting, or other digitally delivered work. I call this system mass sponsorship (meaning that anyone who can pay online, anywhere, any time, can easily purchase a sponsorship for any amount they wish, of a particular artwork marketed this way). How does this work?

There will be many different kinds of replicating accounts (which will evolve through natural selection for human usefulness). Almost all of them will have an owner’s dashboard — but some will also have a (minimal) public dashboard, for public interaction with the account.

To reach the public dashboard, just click the account’s name. The dashboard will let anybody download a free copy( or streaming), if a sponsored copy is currently available. It will also let anyone buy prepaid downloads in bulk — and attach their own sponsor’s message, to go out with each download they paid for. (This differs from ordinary advertising, in that the music or whatever stops when all sponsorships have run out — creating social pressures to find new sponsors for the content.)

We guesstimate that about 98% of all end users will receive the art totally free — paid for by the 2% who sponsor bulk copies — to support the artist, get their own message out, and do good in the world. 98% free distribution translates to an average bulk sponsorship of 50 copies. This seems doable since very large sponsorships will have disproportionate weight.

Using the public dashboard, a sponsor can either create a new account to deliver their sponsorship (to reserve access for his, her, or its friends and networks exclusively), or buy into an existing account and its circulation (reaching new people within desired communities, who may be outside the sponsor’s existing social networks). Sponsorship accounts will never expire (even when empty), since anyone, anywhere, any time can buy into the account anew — instantly refreshing all copies of that account, anywhere in the world. (The various different copies of the same account can transact business in different languages, which end users can change any time.)

To monetize this system, just charge perhaps 1% or 2% of all sponsorship money coming in.

Demo software soon at www.RepliCounts.org/demo/

It will be easier to understand this project with a demo version that will let anyone create and use their own RepliCounts. The PodCampPhilly presentation of RepliCounts will be the first to have any demo (version 0.0, now being written in Python). The early versions cannot be trusted to handle money, so they will have no shopping cart. But they can still have practical uses — for example, mass sponsorship could work, even if artists must activate each sponsorship after receiving payment from the sponsor by PayPal, check, cash, or whatever. The only drawback is that sponsorship will not instant, nor as convenient as with a shopping cart.

These accounts can be maintained permanently at very low cost (in fact, negative cost). So while we will not guarantee permanence of the demo accounts, it is likely that they could still be around in 20 years, still paying the artists if there is any public interest in their work.

As this demo advances it will be available at http://www.RepliCounts.org/demo/.