I found the missing piece of the new paradigm this past weekend in the basement conference ballroom of the World Future Summit. Ramez Naam was giving a talk on the slides below.
His data was so good, I had tears in my eyes, my brain full of positive visions of the future and then his world collided with mine.
Jump to slide 122: The Bug in the Software: Our Market System can't effectively deal with Externalities. Our market system is very good, but it's limited to the things than can express itself in the current language of the market system. The big problems we need to solve don't fit into our existing market system. The language of the market system is money, currency, transactions. We need a way to turn our shifting values into an input to our market system. That input is a currency, something than can be transacted, tracked, traded, bought and sold.
And this is why banks and the financial industry needs to embrace, encourage, build and extend into the realm of alternate currencies. Here's where we'll jump to my presentation on the Future of Alternate Currencies and Transactions, slide 9, where I talk about Bitcoin and Ven.
The point I hear everyone missing when talking about new currencies are the additional VALUES encoded in the DNA of these new currencies. These concepts are being expressed in collaborative consumption, freecycling and lending/borrowing activities today. Companies are revolutionizing these activities. ProBono and Gift Economy are not tracked on any balance sheet because they can not be expressed in the current market economy language.
When Naam talks about a Carbon tax, why not make it a carbon currency? No one likes taxes, but people love currency: money! Wouldn't you love to trade, earn, sell carbon currency?
Let's put the values we care about into a metaphor the market can utilize: an Alternate Currency.
There's lots more money to be made with many currencies than with fewer. Wouldn't like you to have more opportunities to make buckets of money? If you do, consider embracing alternate currencies. Make more streams for the money to flow.
Great post, Heather. We're certainly exploring similar domains of value exchange, proxies and systems of transfer. I'd love to sync up with you again at some point soon.
Posted by: Rand | July 13, 2011 at 04:26 PM
Thanks Rand! Would love to talk. I guess I'll have to plan another Bay Area trip soon!
Posted by: heathervescent | July 13, 2011 at 04:32 PM