the topic of "microcurrency" has come up on this list before and is reappearing with considerations being given to small charges for Web pages. I've been thinking about this a bit and thought I'd share some interesting ideas. (YMMV!!) 1st, there was a really excellent article on microcurrency in the Economist I believe that was really touting it as a revolutionary change in the economy. I agree with this wholeheartedly. the possibility that people can - exchange extremely small amounts of cash without the cost of overhead - and virtually instaneously, - over large geographical distances, - potentially even seamlessly with regard to different currency exchanges, - and a large infrastructure exists to distribute intellectual property for free, - (possibly invisibly to governments) will all contribute to a REVOLUTIONARY effect on culture. my key idea on all of this is that the whole idea of copyright is going to melt when you introduce cash, not be strengthened. there are a lot of people out there who think that one has to try to put a lock and chain on web pages or whatever that one is "selling", and the horrible problem of the net is that anything can be copied. and these people are feverishly working on specious "solutions" to this "problem" right now. WRONG!! this is precisely the view from the old ideology that says, "you have to protect what you are selling from other people or you won't make any money". this theme will increasingly be discredited in the cyberspace world, which works inherently differently in a remarkable manner. I submit that things like the release of public domain standards and products like Java and Netscape for free are not merely blips at this moment but increasingly are going to be the marketing plan of the future. the idea is that you give away your product for FREE, and then people pay you if they like it. this new ideology will be relevant to products that are not "things" but in fact are more in the realm of intellectual property, i.e. writing, software, cyberspace web pages, etc. the beauty of this system is that NO LONGER is "unauthorized" distribution" the "enemy". it is your FRIEND, a key aspect of profit!! the company that doesn't think in terms of this new ideology will try to control the distribution of their product. they will set up draconian systems that try to restrict the flow of the product to "authorized users". (i.e. those who pay in advance). our entire society thinks within this paradigm, including the government, which is makes noises about ways to restrict copying on the internet by introduction of actual physical safeguards. NOPE!! a rather extraordinary new economy can replace this, that of voluntary payment. widespread distribution becomes your FRIEND. you DISDAIN things like copyright, because they prevent your "product" from reaching the eyes of potential customers. your goal is actually to distribute the product as far as possible, in a sort of pyramid-like scheme. you want your "customers" to distribute your product to their friends, so that those "friends" potentially become customers in an endless cycle. this approach works amazingly with writing. imagine that if John Markoff suddenly QUIT the NYT and just wrote articles on his own. and imagine that at the bottom, you see a message, "for more of the same, send .5c or more to markoff@liberated.com". I submit that in the future, Markoff will probably be able to make more money than he does at NYT, because he is eliminating the middleman. the newspaper company is primarily built as a *distribution* channel. suddenly he doesn't have to pay anything out of his own salary, so to speak, for distribution. distribution is *free*. he doesn't require anyone else to do it for him. he puts his article in an apropriate place on the net and it circulates like a VIRUS if it is well received. the more people that see the article, the more people that pay him money. in an information system, individual objects have no value. what has value is the FLOW of quality information. if Markoff continues to flow with that good information, people will continue to pay for it. they will perceive that "by paying him, the quality information flow from him to me continues or increases". this same idea works with software. you don't see software as an end product. you see it as something that is evolving over time. and whenever you send money to a company for software, in this new system the idea is that "I like this software, and I want to see it grow. here is my contribution to that". another interesting area is that of patents, and I see this dissolving in the same way. a patent is like trying to put a lock on an idea. but gradually people will realize, only ideas that are implemented have any value. you can't profit and lock an idea at the same time. *dissemination* of ideas is what leads to profit, not locking them up. hence there will be an economic incentive to an inventor to give away his ideas for free, at first. in the old system, where one thinks of an idea as a "thing", this sounds preposterous. but in a new culture where ideas are seen as things that need to be cultivated and grown to work, it will seem eminently sensible. the inventor is releasing his idea to the world, saying "I can expand on this idea, even turn it into a reality, if you send me money". other people can of course steal the idea, but there is no value in the idea itself: the value is in the development of it into evolved new states, or the intellectual expertise of the inventor. in short, microcurrency could have quite a liberating and revolutionary effect on economics as we know it. in the current system, people are not paid for tiny contributions to the whole. the contributions have to be "packaged up" into something like a magazine before individuals can get any profit. a new system may allow people to be compensated directly for things that are hard to quantify. how much was Markoff's last article worth in the NYT? that's impossible to figure out. but if you had a microcurrency, you can calculate exactly how much money people sent to Markoff for his last article. say, across the world, it totalled $843.16. such a sum is not inconceivable. and over time it would be enough for him to make a salary over the whole year on, perhaps!! I'm arguing that this is increasingly going to become VIABLE over the next few years with cyberspace and microcurrency. the beauty of this system is that this increased granularity filters down to individual pieces such as a single piece of writing, a single software program, single contributions by individual people that can be rewarded tangibly. that's all that currency is, in its most basic form: a system whereby members of a society say to each other, "please continue to do that for me, do more of it, and do it even better-- because I value it *this* much!!" there is a lot of ink in the press lately about the Netscape/Java assault on the Microsoft bastion. I think there is something more important conceptually going on at a lower level. Microsoft has never released a product for free to the world. they are still in the old paradigm, "you have to control something to prosper". they are at this minute coming out with a PROPRIETARY (read: "you have to lock something to profit from it") alternative to Java. Netscape understands the contrary philosophy BEAUTIFULLY. you write the software, and DISTRIBUTE IT FOR FREE. same with Java: you create OPEN STANDARDS. these companies don't fully understand what direction they are going in (notice how they are only committing to the idea of free software or standards "from the start", but not afterwards), but I think they are the precursors to a radically transformed economic system based on cyberspace microcurrency. the microcurrency situation can even be set up in a company. "whoever codes this computer problem will receive [x] dollars from the company". the whole economic system becomes a fluid, pulsing entity that filters down to the tiniest fraction of value and gives each individual a quantitative value on his contribution. companies talk about "incentive systems" today, but perhaps the entire economy will become an enormous incentive system in this way in the future!! in this system, ultimately, I think the whole concept that someone "buys a product" will dissolve into the idea that "one rewards intellectual productivity to bring more of the same". it's as fundamental and intuitive as the difference between atoms and bits.