We can go online in the space of ten seconds
we have 20 tabs with amazing initiatives
and amazing people all around the world.
It naturally raises my standards and raises
my expectations in terms of what I can achieve.
And when I see all this stuff,
it's sort of this feeling of overwhelming
what the hell would I do with this?!
On the other hand, when I'm clear,
it's just this complete bliss and ecstasy
that there's just so much richness
and if you talk about wealth
I feel like I have the world's
collective consciousness at my fingertips
and I just feel so rich!
Alot of us had parents that were baby boomers
and potentialy disillusioned hippies.
They supported our creative side
and somehow we caught their idealism.
and now we're interested
in the structure of money.
I think it's going to be really incumbent upon
those of us for whom digital technology is more natural
to invent the systems of the future.
I can't imagine how many great ideas out there
are buried in the backs of the minds of people
-- of young students, with a lot of debt --
who just don't have the ability to pursue them.
It's like shackling our innovators.
When you base lending and credit on things like
financial history or cosigners,
those things exclude millions of people
around the world that don't have them.
However everyone has potential,
and if you can base credit on future potential,
that brings a lot more people into financial inclusion.
It's actually not a question that you pay
for what you already got,
you actually pay for what you will get.
The things that can be made because you paid.
I think one of the things that's going on right now is
a re-examination of value,
and of wealth,
and of assets,
and of a lot of words
that have a lot to do with money
but really aren't about money.
Money itself seems to be a mystery
for most people.
It is just so shockingly alien to you
if you compare it for how many
decades you are using it until you are questioning
yourself for the frist time what it really is.
We've given money the properties of the divine.
You know money is not wealth,
money is potential wealth.
But we give it such power that it influences
the way we feel about ourselves.
By experiencing a complimentary system,
I changed my notion of wealth.
People need to see themselves more as producers.
And if they see themselves as producers
they can also see that
they create the value and that there's probably
someone out there can benefit from that value.
There is actually a direct link between the kind of
new social habits we are learning online
and the social movement which is created
we're more willing to connect with someone who
we've only seen a profile of online,
and to trust them, in real space or with our time
I would share almost all of my information
with complete strangers because I feel
there's an integrity to the way I live,
and it's fine for other people to know about that.
As we work together
creating these collective projects
then trust naturally comes from that
and out of that trust we then seek to
organize new forms of social life
so trust is at the basis of the
re-creation of real communities
which are no longer bounded by place,
but are bounded by shared values.
You put yourself in a more vulnerable state
when you express what you need.
We go out and we buy it
from people we don't know,
but we don't turn to our community.
Putting all that information into one database
creates an enormous amount of potential energy.
When you know what a community needs
you know what the market demand is.
If there was a kind of bank that allowed me to
convert my money to a local currency right now,
I would do that.
Successful businesses and other
non-business organizations of the future
will have to be more transparent and more human,
and the ones that succeed in the long run
I think are going to come back
more as peers in our society
so they can behave in trustworthy ways,
rather than trying to tell us over and over again
to trust them.
Banks are going to have to evolve
to meet the new business models around
mediating trust and communities
and the ones that do are going survive
and take on a very different role,
and the ones that don't I think are just
going to go out of business.
Try to start and think in new ways
join the discussion, like this discussion,
on what's to come and what is value,
what could replace money.
It's more about creating an atmosphere
within a company or organization that allows
the people who work there to speak out
crazy ideas without being fired right away.
Think about the first days of aviation.
The Wright brothers would say,
"OK, let's make this thing fly!"
But they wouldn't think about huge infrastructure that is needed;
airports and embassies and people and security
and you know all these are huge opportunities.
The bank again is not an external entity to the community
but is an expression of the community itself.
What are the kinds of flows that we want to see?
What is that we want to shape?
What is that we want to measure?
And then try to design currencies for them.
Think about currency as
open to the principles of the free market.
Just as corporations are free to compete for
various value-creating opportunities,
currencies should be free to compete.
Different currency models competing
against one another for their ability to
serve different purposes.
We're starting to reconsider how
the commercial economy
intersects with gift exchange and the commons.
And no business likes to hear that
something of what they're doing
might fall into the commons, might be a gift,
might be very cheap to do, or easy to do
but they are, it is.
and if you actually have your eyes open and look
at those forces and understand them deeply,
you will see new business opportunities
around the commons,
contributing to the commons,
being in a symbiotic relationship
with the commons that are different
from the way we used to do business.
And I do think there is a great
money making opportunity
in currency innovation
so that rather than simply innovating
in terms of the financial instruments built on top
of the current currency system
you go underneath
and actually develop new operating systems.