The other night I heard that some of the rules for selling stock have been changed to allow companies to sell stock directly to investors. I have been thinking that this may have the potential to support an interesting system. Imagine "Portfolio Accounts" with a debit-card like access method. Instead of paying for an item at a store with money or credit you use your Portfolio-Account card and buy the item with shares/micro-shares of stock. Stock brokers may offer this type of service in response the competition of companies bypassing them. Stock brokers could setup services that mediate between transactions calculating trades and values "on-the-fly" (anonymity could be tricky to build into this system). If the company you worked for paid you with stock instead of money this would complete the loop. Portfolio Accounts could be "cashed out" but if they have all of the attributes of money and don't suffer from inflation why not keep your stock invested. This also has the interesting feature of avoiding all taxes. Until you "cash out" your account you would not have to pay taxes, if you never need cash out your account, you never need to pay taxes. I suspect that our friendly governments would try to "correct" this "problem" in the long run if they can. Steven Weller writes: [snip]

In such a system, where does credit come in? If I have a certificate that is worth X, then does the recipient know that it's from my "credit card"? How do I obtain credit, and in what form does it exist?

Could credit be supported by distributed futures market system?

Furthermore, how do we assess the value of real physical things in a system like this?

If you had a stock transaction mediated economy the "currency" in this system would be backed buy the goods and services produced by companies issuing stock. You could view stock in this system as private currencies, and there would be thousands of competing currencies. I have been thinking that this might be a viable path to denationalized currencies. Stock certificates could be based on crytographic verification protocols. If all the stock in this system were 'bearer-based' (i.e., you posess it you own it) you could also support cash-like anonymity as well.

-- Steven Weller <Windsor Consulting Group> +1 502 454 0054 (voice) OS-9 Consultancy and Software +1 502 451 5935 (fax) Finger for public key 00 02 3C 2F 83 76 D3 77 2A 95 E8 90 94 9A 9D 74 http://iglou.com/windsorgrp stevenw@iglou.com or realtime@well.sf.ca.us

Cordially, [-------------------------------------------------------------------------] [ Public pgp-key: email penny@tyrell.net with subject as 'send pgp-key' ] [ My opinions are mine. I have scored 90% on the the Turing Test. ] [ Alan Penny, penny@tyrell.net ]